Death by Water

Chapter 6. Tossing the Dead Dogs

1

After the Big Vertigo struck again, I developed some singular new habits. Once a dizzy spell had abated, I would tumble precipitously into a sleep of total, unrelenting darkness. If what followed the initial episode had been the sleep of death, I mused, then I must now be existing in a state beyond life. And yet my consciousness was still functioning, so according to the principle of Cogito, ergo sum, I was still present and alive in reality.

What, exactly, was my state of being? There were times when my eyes would pop open in the dark — it could have already been morning, but the curtains were drawn against the light — and I didn’t have the slightest idea who I was, or where. In my ears I would hear a nostalgic, songlike poem repeated over and over, and those lines seemed to offer a clue to my peculiar existential state: A current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell / He passed the stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool. Yes, I would think, taking the sequence a step further. Buffeted by the deep-water current, he keeps rising and falling, floating and sinking, seconds away from being dragged into the maelstrom of the whirlpool.

I am I, and yet I’m something more, because I feel that I am he as well: in other words, I am my father. My father, who drowned in what I realize now was the prime of his life; my father, who died when he was twenty years younger than I was when the Big Vertigo ambushed me for the first time. That realization would often be followed by another half-conscious epiphany: I loved my father! I would usually wake up again then (more completely this time), awash in dueling emotions: an almost sheepish feeling of relief doing battle with soul-deep despair.

Another new behavior pattern had to do with the way I emerged from sleep. There were times when I would lie awake until the wee hours, assailed by an anxious premonition that another attack was on its way, and I would finally resort to taking the medicine prescribed for such emergencies, which (as a side effect) would cause me to wake up far too early the next morning. However, if I just lay quietly in bed, I often managed to fall into a completely natural sleep, and I would roll out of bed sometime before noon feeling abundantly well rested.

Those prescription meds were potent, so I tried not to take them too often. The side effects weren’t entirely negative, though. When I first resurfaced after a medicated sleep, long before dawn, I would be engulfed in what I thought of as hypermemory: wave upon wave of extraordinarily intense recollections. After I opened my eyes for the second time, usually just before noon, I would jot down some quick notes — rough and rudimentary, like an artist’s initial pencil sketches — about the memories that had washed over me. I couldn’t help wondering whether those remembrances might be connected somehow with the powerful force that ushered in the dizzy spells, and I had an unshakable feeling that the advent of those seizures must have some larger significance. Surely the Big Vertigo’s cataclysmic appearance in my life couldn’t be completely random and devoid of meaning?

I fell prey to another odd notion as well: a strong certainty that the serial attacks of vertigo (which were so much more powerful than anything I had ever experienced) must eventually, inevitably, result in permanent damage to my mental faculties. I wasn’t merely terrified by this bleak prospect; I also felt that — especially if my days of mental acuity were numbered — I ought to pay extra-close attention to the surges of remembrance, which were clearly trying to tell me something before it was too late. For the past fifty years, at least, I had started my daily work ritual by making notes on index cards about whatever had emerged during my dreams and the interstitial sessions of hazy, half-waking contemplation. Those jottings would often provide useful clues for my current writing, so I couldn’t very well let the waves of memory slide by unrecorded.

But I had made a firm decision to abandon the drowning novel, and I had also made up my mind that I would never write long-form fiction again. I simply didn’t feel I had another book in me. So why was I still compulsively transcribing those resurgent memories? There’s really no way to explain it except by saying that for me, scribbling on index cards was like a chronic disease, and there didn’t appear to be a cure.

2

During the bouts of hypermemory, I kept remembering the day the war ended.

Many writers of my generation have described the weather as cloudy and overcast, but in the forests of Shikoku it was a perfect blue-sky day. Just before noon, the local children were herded into a line. Then we followed our teachers up the hill behind the national school to the mansion of the village headman (in effect, the mayor), which stood on an elevated bluff overlooking the valley. Because no children were allowed inside, we congregated next to a hedge that surrounded the property. There had been some cloud cover in the early morning, but the sky had gradually cleared; the forest was glittering in the sunlight and the entire area was alive with the sound of cicadas. Even with all the ambient noise, we could still hear what was going on inside the mansion.

First there was a loud commotion among the adult males and then, after the headman had given a little speech to calm them down, the sound of the women’s quiet weeping rose to a wail. A moment later two of the teachers from our school appeared, ducking through the small wicket gate next to the main entrance. They told us the emperor’s broadcast had ended and ordered us to head back to the valley. As we were marching along in formation, with the road hot beneath our bare feet, we were informed by some of the older kids that Japan had lost the war, and then we split up and went our separate ways. When I passed my house I noticed that the tall, slatted-wood storm windows were closed, and I got the sense that my mother was probably doing some kind of handwork in the rear parlor. (After my father died, those windows would remain unopened for many years.) I took the narrow footpath through the fields next to my house and headed toward Myoto Rock.

Down by the river, there was a spot where the women from the hamlet on the north shore did their washing. Above it was a round outcropping of rock with pussy willows growing out of a fissure in the ledge. In the shadow of the boulder, along the riverbank, there was a triangular patch of water that formed a natural wallow. I used to wade along with the current, then throw myself down and settle into the little grotto until I was completely submerged. Using my legs for leverage, I would force my small body into the interior, with the rock jutting out over me like a protective roof.

This secluded part of the river was protected from the current, so there was a permanent accumulation of dissolved clay on the bottom. When I stretched out, my entire body would be enveloped in the soft, smooth, slippery mud. If I was lying flat, my presence couldn’t be detected by the women who were squatting at the water’s edge not far away, washing dishes or doing laundry. Once I had mastered the art of squeezing into that secret grotto without being seen, I would head there alone on a regular basis to luxuriate in the freedom of simply lying in the mud for hour upon blissful hour.

Whenever I was in early-morning remembrance mode the memory of this cozy hiding place would come flooding back, overlaid by a later but uncannily parallel memory that made it even more potent. As an adult, I had read a novel in which a French writer retold the Robinson Crusoe story, with a particular focus on the character of Friday. Crusoe, stranded on a desert island and exhausted by a daily life of endless toil and perpetual danger, had a hideaway not unlike mine where he could revel in submerging his weary body in a grotto of soft, wet clay. Every time I read the scene, I felt completely swept away — not only in my heart but somatically as well, on the deepest level. And now the memory of that book was permanently superimposed over the recollections of my muddy retreat.

When I reached the bank of the river on that day in August 1945, I took off my sweat-soaked clothes and laid them on a rock by the alfresco laundry spot. Wearing nothing but a skimpy Etchu-style loincloth, I immersed myself in the placid water of my hidden grotto. I lay there faceup, letting my body sink until the water started to fill my ears. I stayed that way for a long time, lost in reverie. After a while I stuck one arm out of the water and discovered that the afternoon air had turned chilly. I raised my torso and fixed my gaze on Myoto Rock, which reared above the glimmering flow of the river.

Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. Leaving the wallow, I swam toward the place where the river waves were crashing violently against the enormous rock, and as I approached the monolithic landmark I gave myself up to the current. It carried me along and deposited me on one side of Myoto Rock. Muscle memory took over then, and I knew exactly how to move. Using my arms and legs, I propelled myself forward, with the swirling current tickling my chest. When I reached my destination, I stuck my head through the underwater fissure in the giant rock. On the other side of the crack, diagonal rays of sunlight slanted down, illuminating the dark blue pool. In that space I could see dozens of silvery dace, brimming with latent power, suspended in the water in quiescent repose.

At this point, as remembrance merges with fantasy, I seem to see the naked body of a large man in the murky depths below the school of dace. There on the river bottom the corpse sways gently, nudged by the current. It’s my father, of course. And I — that is, my retrospectively imagined child-self — am trying to imitate the way the dead body moves.

Back in the present moment, I reached for an index card and my fountain pen. I love my father desperately, I wrote in Japanese. But even in my deeply moved state I felt compelled to add a little orthographic embellishment, so a moment later I spelled out the phonetically Japanized version of the English word “desperately” in the margin: de-su-pe-ree-to-rii.

3

Dear Kogii,

I received a very thoughtful letter from Chikashi. “Thoughtful” really is the only way to describe it, in every sense of the word. Not a single line was wasted on futile optimism or pointless pessimism; she simply gave a straightforward account of your current condition. However, since it’s entirely possible that my interpretation of what she said may have been colored in part by wishful thinking, I’m writing to ask if you would be so kind as to corroborate my conclusions.

1. The Big Vertigo wasn’t some freakish occurrence that happened once while you were visiting down here on Shikoku and never again. There have been three more episodes since you returned to Tokyo.

2. You’ve been taking it easy on order from your family doctor, but you haven’t followed up by going to a university hospital for an MRI and so on. Both your wife and daughter have encouraged you to do so, but you haven’t been receptive to their suggestions. Because the dizzy spell that knocked you for a loop on Shikoku took you completely by surprise, perhaps you’re afraid the results of the examination might be even more of a shock — anyhow, that’s our theory. If the tests show some irreparable abnormality in your brain, you probably wouldn’t be able to do your literary work, and we would all have to accept that you would never be the same.

When Professor Musumi refused to be screened for lung cancer even though he was aware that something was very wrong inside his chest, you took on the task — at his wife’s request — of trying to convince your longtime mentor to submit to treatment. He refused, with fatal consequences, and now it looks as though you’re borrowing the same excuses he gave you virtually verbatim. Chikashi is prepared to respect your choices, and I agree completely. No matter what happens I really feel as if your homecoming trip to our little valley in the mountains made you realize something important about everyone in our family, including yourself. If I’m mistaken, I hope we can laugh it off the way we’ve done with so many of your preconceived notions and misperceptions.

3. Whatever the diagnosis turns out to be, if you would simply take a break and get some rest, then you should be able to get back to your usual regimen of work — within your new limitations, of course — just as Professor Musumi did toward the end. However, if you remain mired in the denial stage and if your prose starts to show any degree of mental decline, it would be a very serious matter. To make sure that doesn’t happen, Chikashi has been thinking about creating a system whereby any manuscripts you produce from here on would be vetted by some of the editors you’ve been working with for years, before publication. And if they find significant problems, then we would have your publishers announce that Mr. Choko will be retiring from writing, effective immediately.

4. At the moment, even though you’re feeling rather low, I gather your life isn’t too different from when you were in good health, and while you’ve stopped work on the drowning novel, you’re still continuing to crank out a newspaper essay every month. I assume that your reading habits are pretty much the same as always, except that you’re being careful not to spend too much time reading books in foreign languages because constantly stopping to look things up in dictionaries can be a strain.

Another reason I’m writing this letter is to figure out the best way for us to stay in touch now that the Big Vertigo is part of the equation. (Needless to say, if an emergency should arise Chikashi would telephone me at home.)

There isn’t much news to report on my end, aside from Masao and Unaiko’s theatrical activities. Ever since you returned to Tokyo they’ve been nice enough to keep me in the loop much more than before, and Unaiko, in particular, seems to have really opened up lately. She’s been confiding in me in a much deeper way, and I have a feeling our talks will raise some matters I’ll need to discuss with you at some point.

However, since Chikashi mentioned that there’s no guarantee you’ll always be able to answer every letter I write, and since you’ve been jotting things down on index cards at a great rate — though not as part of any particular writing project — she kindly offered to make copies of any relevant notes (with your approval, of course) and send them to us down here. Unaiko and I will view those dispatches as your replies to our queries. As you know, I’ve already received the first batch of photocopied notes from Chikashi, and Unaiko and I have been perusing them with great interest — a task Unaiko approached with the same verve and intensity you’ll remember from your own interactions with her. During the process, one thing that jumped out at her was where you confess your feelings of love to the point of desperation (or words to that effect) for our father.

Unaiko said that while you were staying at the Forest House, she shared the story of what happened to her at Yasukuni Shrine. I gather she was hoping to get some reciprocal feedback from you, as a liberal peacenik who also happened to have idolized his right-wing-fanatic father, and who got carried away to the point of singing along with a German military anthem himself. Anyhow, she was apparently left with the sense that you had been less than forthcoming about your own emotions.

Unaiko wants to use the theater to express her feelings about ultranationalism, militarism, gender politics, and so on — feelings that seem to stem from some sort of long-ago personal trauma. I think it was because she feels so strongly about those issues that she took the rather extreme step of criticizing you for declaring your sudden, unexpected surges of love for our poor, misguided father.

That reminds me — the drowning novel may be totally kaput as far as you’re concerned, but the young people who have been hanging out at the Forest House seem to be clinging to some hope that you will tell the story eventually. They seem to be saying, in effect, “Hey, Choko, don’t think we’re going to let you off the hook so easily!”

Now I’d like to give you an update about what Unaiko is working on these days. Out of the entire group, Masao Anai was hit the hardest by your decision to abandon the drowning novel. Unlike me, he tends to take setbacks very much to heart.

When he first heard that you were coming back to Shikoku to finish writing the book, Masao was running around exclaiming, “At last! At last!” I’ve never seen him so excited, and even Unaiko stopped for a minute to laugh. Of course, we’re all aware that Masao is obsessed with the idea of dramatizing all your novels, so his childlike delight seemed entirely natural — as did his subsequent disappointment when the plan fell through.

Unaiko, on the other hand, is choosing to put a positive spin on things by focusing on the fact that you’ve finally been liberated from the drowning novel and can now move on. This seems a bit counterintuitive to me, but she seems to think that by being critical of you and your work she will somehow be able to entice you into further collaboration. (Reverse psychology, maybe?) In any event, I gather you’ve already heard about the Caveman Group’s program for teaching drama in secondary schools all over the prefecture, so you know that its current project is an adaptation of Natsume Soseki’s classic novel Kokoro. Unaiko and Masao lost no time in drafting a script, and they’ve already presented it at several schools. The early version was very well received, and the troupe has been inundated with requests and invitations from a number of additional schools.

But Unaiko isn’t someone who rests on her laurels after a handful of favorable reviews and just repeats the same performance over and over. No, she’s been busy tape-recording the students’ impressions of this special style of teaching and then giving careful consideration to their comments. For the dramatic reading of Kokoro, Unaiko is trying to make the piece evolve organically, one step at a time. And now, with Masao’s help, she’s attempting to distill the result of her preliminary labors into a finished work of art (or, more precisely, into a perpetually evolving work of art). All along, she’s been continually polishing the style and technique that emerged from the dog-tossing piece, and she’s been using the same lapidary process to enliven her drama classes as well. She has gotten the students at various schools to throw a great many symbolic “dogs.” At the moment, she’s busy compiling those responses, including a fair number of critical remarks, and synthesizing them into a revised script for the play.

The plan is for Unaiko and her colleagues to give a major public performance of Kokoro, showcasing their unique interactive approach, at the middle school’s cylinder-shaped auditorium, which will be converted into a theater for the occasion. (That rather daring structure has gotten a lot of criticism because it was very costly to build, and the middle school’s dwindling enrollment didn’t seem to warrant the investment.) They’re thinking that if the building could be given a catchy name like “theater in the round” and turned into an active cultural venue, it might revitalize the village. That’s why everyone is excited about this new idea.

But what does this have to do with you, up there in Tokyo? Well, I took the liberty of offering to ask whether you’d be willing to help Unaiko create the script for the upcoming play, which is something you could do without actually being here. (As you know, there was some tentative discussion about the possibility of your delivering a related lecture, but it isn’t going to happen, for obvious reasons.) At any rate, I’ll be very grateful if you would do this favor for me — or rather, for us.

You know, here in this tiny village I’ve been typecast for many years as the younger sister of an illustrious author and activist who has always been a lightning rod for all sorts of criticism. As a result of dealing with that sort of thing on a regular basis, I’ve had no choice but to evolve into a political animal myself!

4

I was already familiar with the Tossing the Dead Dogs project, but when I’m asked to commit to something I can’t help wanting to know exactly what is involved. That’s just the way I am. I was aware that the young members of the Caveman Group were working on turning Kokoro into a dramatic reading aimed at students, and I was happy to help, but I still had some questions.

For one thing, when it came time to actually mount a performance, I couldn’t see how they were going to turn Soseki’s subtle, understated novel into an interactive dramatic free-for-all. In Unaiko’s approach to drama, the spontaneous exchanges that can occur between the audience and the actors onstage become a major aspect of the production.

Granted, the so-called dead dogs that are her trademark props are just stuffed toys, but how would throwing them back and forth be integrated into a play about friendship, betrayal, existential malaise, and suicide? And in this instance (as opposed to the earlier performance piece, which was literally about dogs), what was the significance of the canine “corpses” supposed to be?

I tried to imagine various scenarios but I finally gave up and had Chikashi telephone Unaiko, on my behalf, to ask for additional details about how the Caveman Group was planning to pull this off. Unaiko replied (via Chikashi) that the practice script she was currently using was derived from recordings of comments by the students she had met through her dramatic presentations at various schools. Unaiko then proceeded to read some of the raw, unedited lines to Chikashi over the phone, saying she hoped I would share my thoughts about them.

Chikashi, who appeared to be enjoying her go-between role immensely, wrote those lines down and then showed them to me. She also filled me in on the origin story of the dog-tossing trope, including some details I hadn’t heard before.

It had begun accidentally, during the Caveman Group’s revival of a play dating back to the New Drama movement that had blossomed in Japan before the war. During the scene in question, a young wife played by Unaiko was sitting on a chair in a Western-style parlor holding a pet dog (represented by a stuffed animal) on her lap. The audience began heckling Unaiko’s character for some reason and, spurred on by the jeers and catcalls, she pretended to strangle the dog — acting up a storm and making the “murder” look very realistic. She tossed the “carcass” into the rowdy audience, whereupon the “dead dog” was immediately heaved back onto the stage.

Apparently it was a seminal moment in the evolution of Unaiko’s dramatic method, as she realized that while in reality most of the audience members were positively disposed toward her and her colleagues, in the context of the play those same spectators were clearly getting a tremendous kick out of razzing the actors on the stage. (As an aside, Chikashi mentioned having read somewhere about a psychiatric method called drama therapy, in which throwing stuffed animals is used to help patients work through various issues. Unaiko, it seemed, had serendipitously stumbled upon the same cathartic technique.)

The first, unscripted melee created a great deal of buzz, so in the next performance the bit with the stuffed dog was repeated, only this time with conscious intent. The dramatists added the confrontational give-and-take with the audience to the original script, and a rather staid prewar play was reinvented as Tossing the Dead Dogs. The interactive element turned out to be extremely popular, and it soon became the Caveman Group’s dramatic calling card.

The technique had grown ever more sophisticated, to the point where the stage directions now called for surreptitiously planting a number of shills or decoys throughout the audience — people whose sole purpose was to raise a choreographed ruckus while pretending to be ordinary members of the crowd. There were also quite a few fans who happily paid their own way and came to the show armed with stuffed animals, so there was no way of knowing how many “dead dogs” might fly back and forth on a given night. Over time, the art form evolved to the point where most (though not all) of the performances tended to end abruptly right at the apex of the dog-flinging pandemonium.

Unaiko told Chikashi that she was wondering, a bit nervously, what would happen during the upcoming presentation of the Caveman Group’s dramatization of Kokoro. Based on her prior experience, Unaiko sketched out her vision of how the evening might go, with the caveat that since audience participation was always a wild card, there was really no way to predict the outcome. Her innovative stagecraft could turn out to be a brilliant success or an unmitigated disaster; they would just have to wait and see.

Unaiko explained that the audience would be made up of students from junior high and high schools all over the prefecture, along with teachers and family members, and the event would take place in the circular auditorium, which had been converted for the occasion into a “theater in the round” (technically, a theater in a semicircle). The performance would begin with a straightforward dramatic reading. When that came to an end, the official thespians would congregate at stage left and the stealth participants (who had until then been sitting unobtrusively in the audience) would line up on the opposite side. These imposters would start directing questions and critical comments at the actors; the responses would quickly become heated, and the civil discussion would degenerate into a raucous argument. Up until then, everything would have been scripted in advance and the actors would be reciting lines they had already rehearsed. But when the ringers began quarreling with the actors, the audience members would soon realize that such interaction was not only allowed but encouraged, and would presumably follow suit. Then, if everything went according to plan, the scene would escalate into a near riot, with “dead dogs” being hurled back and forth with wild abandon.

5

Dear Kogii,

I’m happy to report that Unaiko’s play was a complete triumph! (As you know, it was performed at our local theater in the round on the last Saturday in September, as her first dramatic project targeted at an audience of junior high and high school students.) I hope you will share this letter with Chikashi, as I think you’ll both find it very entertaining.

I must confess that I’m writing partly to coax you, brother dear, into lending your long-distance assistance to Unaiko and me once more as we tackle a new challenge. I’ll save some energy for making that pitch, but first I want to tell you about Unaiko’s theatrical tour de force.

Picture this: you walk into a round building and see an empty stage in the shape of a half circle, with the other half of the sphere filled with curved tiers of seating. No curtain separates the stage from the spectators, and the audience members look down at a darkened stage that almost appears to be a hole or abyss in the center of the room. It’s still daylight outside, and while several high windows and domed skylights provide a small amount of natural light, inside the theater it’s quite dim.

Only one thing is visible at first: Unaiko’s slender form, standing motionless at the center of the stage. As the lights come up, we see that she is costumed and made up to look like the very model of a veteran teacher of Japanese language and literature at the high school level. (Incidentally, for the past three years Unaiko has been going around to junior high schools as a visiting instructor of drama, so she’s known and loved by hundreds of students, and the audience is packed with her fans.)

Unaiko is holding a small hardcover edition of Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro, in the familiar binding we associate with his collected works. The basic premise of the play is that Unaiko is delivering a lecture to the teenage students who are onstage and in the audience. Needless to say, both the words she addresses to this imaginary class and the way the second half of the play unfolds were shaped (and enriched) by our earlier discussions with you.

“The first time I read this book, I was just about the same age most of you are now,” she begins. “On that occasion, and subsequent readings as well, I wielded my red and blue pencils freely, underlining certain things and drawing circles around others. (These days I guess you would probably be using highlighters or marking pens, right?) Anyway, I read this book over and over. However, from the very beginning I had doubts and questions, and I’m going to start by talking about them.

“As preparation for this lecture, I gave you two homework assignments. One was a questionnaire asking you to list some of the words in this novel that strike you as significant. The second assignment was this: I asked all of you to read Kokoro by yourselves, just as I did many years ago. The story starts out as the narrator, a young man we know only as ‘I,’ enters into an unusual friendship with an older man whom he always refers to, respectfully, as Sensei.

“However, the Sensei character commits suicide, leaving behind nothing but a long note of explanation and farewell. The young narrator, in a state of shock, reads the note through to the end — and as we all know, that’s more or less the structure of the entire book. We’re going to begin by reading the part of the suicide note where Sensei is remembering the time when he initially opened up to the young narrator. The reader will be an actor from our theater troupe; he’ll be out here in a moment with the text. This time, his only job will be to read the one passage, but in our actual play a number of other actors will appear in a variety of roles. Some of them will remain onstage, while others will make a brief appearance and then vanish into the wings, but either way, there’s no need to applaud every time a new character appears. All right — here we go!”

Sensei: Sometimes, you used to look at me with a dissatisfied expression, and you even tried pressuring me to unfurl my past before you, like a picture scroll. That was the first time I really respected you, in my heart of hearts. I was moved by your determination, however audacious or unseemly it might have been, to try to grasp the essence of my being. At the time I was still alive. I didn’t want to die. That is why I refused to grant your request, choosing instead to postpone the revelations until some future date. That time has come, and I am about to cut open my heart and drench your face with my blood. And I will be satisfied if, when my heart stops beating, a new life is lodged in your breast.

After the actor finishes reading this vivid passage, Unaiko continues with her scripted lecture. “As I said in the beginning, when I first read this passage I was about the same age as you students are now. This will probably sound simplistic, but when the Sensei character agrees to allow the young man to start addressing him by that respectful term, he starts to seem like a sympathetic protagonist, so I thought this novel might be an attempt to teach my generation a thing or two about life.

“However, that turned out not to be the case at all. While there is a fair amount of direct dialogue between the two main characters, for the most part Sensei doesn’t really teach the young narrator anything. For example, the young man asks, ‘Is there really guilt in loving?’ and Sensei simply replies, ‘Yes, surely.’ He does offer his young friend some practical advice about steps he could take to be sure of receiving his rightful share of the family property when the time comes, but that’s about it. As we learn later, both of these topics — love and inheriting one’s fair share of worldly goods — created significant problems for Sensei and shaped his life.

“Then when I reached the point of reading the long note Sensei left behind, I realized that this book was probably just written to express the author’s own thoughts through the medium of Sensei’s letter. Sensei lived out his life in self-imposed seclusion, closed off from society, and I felt that he wrote the long suicide note knowing it was his one shot at sharing his story. You may ask, what was the basic message of the note Sensei left behind when he took his own life? As we will see, that note includes the lines I’d like you to remember something. This is the way I have lived my life. So for Sensei, writing a sort of regretful retrospective was apparently his only means of talking about his own conduct after decades of silence.

“But what was that conduct exactly? Well, when he was twenty years old, Sensei was swindled out of his inheritance by an unprincipled uncle. After that, he turned into a wary, guarded person who rarely opened up to another human being. When he was at university, Sensei did have one friend (identified only as ‘K’) to whom he had been so close that they had chosen to live in the same lodging house, and when Sensei learned that K was in love with the daughter of their landlady, Sensei went ahead and got engaged to the girl himself, without saying a word to his friend. K was so heartbroken by this betrayal that he committed suicide, and Sensei happened upon the bloody scene not long afterward. I’m going to read an abridged version to you now.”

Sensei: I stood up and went as far as the doorway. From there, I glanced quickly around his room, which was dimly lit by a single lamp. As soon as I realized what I was seeing, I stood rooted to the spot, unable to move, staring in horror through eyes that seemed to be made of glass. But the initial shock was like a sudden gust of wind, and it only lasted for a moment. “Oh no,” I thought. “This can’t be happening.” It was then that the great, luminous shadow — almost like a black light — that would irrevocably darken my life, forever, spread out before my mind’s eye. My whole body began to tremble.

As you know, Kogii, I’ll always be the first to acknowledge that Unaiko is enormously talented and endowed with a cutting-edge sensibility, but the truth is she wasn’t generally thought of as an outstanding performer. When I watched her putting on a small production like Tossing the Dead Dogs, it struck me that the way it started out so light and comical, then suddenly morphed into a display of unbridled aggression, was typical of her unique dramatic style.

However, when Unaiko stood onstage and read the agonized recollections that Sensei forces himself to recount, I saw something amazing. Apart from the stage lights, the theater was lit only by the natural light leaking in through the high windows (they were just open a crack) and the domed skylights in the ceiling. As Unaiko read those powerful lines, I seemed to see a flash of black light slashing across the stage. That’s how moved I was.

A later section in Kokoro talks about how even after his friend died Sensei went ahead and married the girl they had both been courting, without ever telling her what had driven their friend to suicide. But Sensei never stopped blaming himself, and he was so crippled by guilt that he was never able to venture out into society and work for a living. When Unaiko was reading that section, a short while later, I could have sworn I saw the black light again.

I even asked Masao about it after the play. I said, “Even though Unaiko is doing the directing this time around, you’re acting in the play and also somehow managing to handle the light board. (And I know that in the scene where the ‘dead dogs’ are being thrown, the lighting plays a very important role because it’s used to ramp up the excitement level.) So I was wondering whether what appeared to be a flash of black light cutting across the stage was an effect you deliberately engineered?” Masao laughed, the way he does, so I knew it must have been my imagination. Anyhow, here’s the excerpt that made me see the black light of despair for the second time:

Sensei: From then on, a nameless fear would assail me from time to time. At first, it seemed to come over me without warning from the shadows surrounding me, and I would gasp at its unexpectedness. Later, however, when the experience had become more familiar to me, my heart would readily succumb — or perhaps respond — to it; and I would begin to wonder if this fear had not always been in some hidden corner of my heart, ever since I was born.

Unaiko’s powerful dramatic reading made an indelible impression on me, and I’m now convinced that in addition to all her other talents she is a genuinely gifted actress. Of course, since she was standing on the stage in the guise of a schoolteacher, she had to offer some short explanations as she went along, but I guess the most effective way of showing how Sensei came to terms with his guilt and found a way to continue living was to have him recite a relevant quotation from the book.

Sensei: Although I had resolved to live as if I were dead, my heart would at times respond to the activity of the outside world, and would almost seem to dance with pent-up energy. But as soon as I tried to break through the cloud that surrounded me, a mysterious and terrifying force would descend upon me from I know not where, and the malign power would grip my heart so tightly that I could not move.

Unaiko, as Sensei, delivers those lines, then immediately switches back to schoolteacher mode and addresses the high school students. Under these circumstances, she explains, we can see that a life in which Sensei would venture out into society and hold down a normal job probably wouldn’t have been a realistic possibility. So, Unaiko goes on (I’m paraphrasing here), Sensei muddled along, living in quiet seclusion with his wife and supporting them both on what was left of his inheritance (a lifestyle that, as the vital and adventuresome Meiji Era neared its end, would have struck people as rather unusual). Then, after a chance meeting at the seashore, a young university student inserts himself into Sensei’s low-key, reclusive existence and a bond begins to develop between them. (This explanatory interlude was a truly masterful performance on Unaiko’s part, by the way.) Next Unaiko goes back to the suicide note, which (she explains) shows how Sensei finally reached the conclusion that ending his own life was the only option that made sense anymore.

Now, I was very familiar with the staging of Tossing the Dead Dogs, but this was my first encounter with one of these literature-based productions, and to tell you the truth I was taken completely by surprise when the air was suddenly filled with “dead dogs” being flung in the general direction of Unaiko’s feet to show the audience members’ disagreement with what she was saying. (They could easily have targeted her torso, but I guess they were just trying to make a symbolic point, not injure their idol!) Unaiko’s only response to the kids who had bombarded her with stuffed animals was to calmly continue the dramatic reading.

Sensei: You may wonder why I have chosen to take such a radical way out. But you see, the strange and terrible force that gripped my heart whenever I tried to find an escape in life seemed at last only to leave me free to find escape in death. If I wished to move at all, then I could move only towards my own end.

And then Unaiko read aloud the line she had mentioned a while before, as if she wanted to engrave it onto our hearts.

Sensei: I’d like you to remember something. This is the way I have lived my life.

After a short pause for effect, Unaiko spoke again. “Class, your responses to the questionnaire were excellent,” she announced, to the obvious delight of the authentic students in the audience. “Everything you listed jibes perfectly with the terms the author uses again and again as leitmotifs.”

She went on to explain that among the repeated words, kokoro, meaning “heart” or “the heart of things,” was used most often (forty-two times), followed by the related term kokoro-mochi (translatable as “feelings, mood, or frame of mind”), which popped up twelve times. Not far behind was kakugo (“readiness, resolution, resignation”) with seven appearances. Unaiko pointed out that while all these concepts played an important role in the story, an external event caused Sensei to decide the time had finally come to end his guilt-ridden life. After this explanation, she resumed the dramatic reading in a voice that vibrated with emotion.

Sensei: Then, during the height of the summer, Emperor Meiji passed away. I felt as though the spirit of the Meiji Era that began with the emperor had ended with him as well. I was overcome with the feeling that I and the rest of my generation, who had grown up in that era, were now left behind to live as anachronisms. I shared this epiphany with my wife, but she just laughed and refused to take me seriously. Then she said a curious thing, albeit in jest: “Well then, maybe you should just go ahead and commit junshi, and follow the emperor to the grave.” I had almost forgotten that there was such a word as junshi, but now I turned to my wife and said: “If I did commit junshi, it would be out of loyalty to the spirit of the Meiji Era.”

At that point the first half of the play ended and the lights came up for intermission. This letter is already far too long, so I’ll save the rest of the story to share in the next installment.

6

Dear Kogii,

The second act of the play began with the covering of the five domed skylights by means of a clever mechanical device. Those of us in the audience couldn’t see Unaiko standing on the stage, but the dramatic reading recommenced in the darkness and once again Soseki’s term “black light” flashed across my mind.

Sensei: “Hey!” I called. There was no answer. I called out again, “Hey, K! What’s the matter?” K’s body did not move at all. I stood up and went as far as the doorway. From there, I glanced quickly around his room, which was dimly lit by a single lamp. As soon as I realized what I was seeing, I stood rooted to the spot, unable to move, staring in horror through eyes that seemed to be made of glass. But the initial shock was like a sudden gust of wind, and it only lasted for a moment. “Oh no,” I thought. “This can’t be happening. “ It was then that the great, luminous shadow — almost like a black light — that would irrevocably darken my life, forever, spread out before my mind’s eye. My whole body began to tremble.

When this reading ended, the stage was illuminated by slanting shafts of directional lighting. Because there were motes of dust visibly rising from the entire stage, the angle of the rays was very conspicuous, and they looked to me like a visual echo of the black light I had imagined earlier. The angular rays illuminated two large antique screens that were being pushed forward from the back. The screens bore livid traces of red, obviously made by a thick brush dipped in crimson paint. While this bit of stagecraft didn’t exactly match Soseki’s description, it was clearly meant to represent the projectile bloodstains Sensei saw when he happened upon the scene of his friend’s suicide.

An instant later the shafts of light from above were extinguished and a bunch of high school kids (including some young members of the Caveman Group who were impersonating students) rushed down from the audience onto the stage and dragged the screens off into a dark corner. All the young people who performed the task were boys, but they were soon joined by a number of female students. Then Unaiko, still in character as a high school teacher, separated herself from the crowd of students and stood downstage alone. She began to speak, addressing her remarks to the students who were sharing the stage with her.

“I know I mentioned this earlier, but when I read Kokoro for the first time, I initially thought that it was going to be an educational book. However, I was disappointed to find that there were almost no exchanges between the student (the ‘I’ character) and Sensei that could be described as edifying. However, when I reread the book recently, with a clear agenda in mind, it struck me that it is an educational book after all. In the long letter Sensei leaves behind, he actually asks outright what sort of lessons the young man ought to be learning from Sensei’s experiences. As we’ve already heard, at one point he says: I’d like you to remember something. This is the way I have lived my life. The logical next step, in educational terms, would seem to be a statement phrased in the future tense, don’t you think? Maybe something along the lines of ‘And this is the way I shall die.’

“And now I would like to ask all of you, individually, to put yourselves in the place of the young narrator and think accordingly. Speaking from the point of view of that character, do you feel you’ve learned anything useful from reading this letter from Sensei, which was in effect a message from beyond the grave?”

The students who were standing on the stage proceeded to answer one by one, and I’ll paraphrase some of their replies here from memory. (I got the sense that these lines were derived from the off-the-cuff comments Unaiko had collected from the students during her visiting lectures, but the teenagers spoke the words perfectly, and the lines sounded completely natural.) As you’ll see, the students’ remarks were interspersed with questions and comments from the adults who were onstage with them.

“I don’t think I learned a single thing.”

“I think I might have learned something.”

“Oh? What kind of thing did you learn?”

“Well, a person I respect decides to end his own life, but before doing so he shares his darkest secrets with me — secrets that have already driven him to kill himself by the time I read his letter. So after the person has made this stunning confession and then killed himself, leaving me behind, there must be something to be learned from what he’s shared with me. As the narrator, I would feel as if this is the first time a life lesson has been so vividly seared into my heart, and I wouldn’t be likely to forget it any time soon.”

“But what’s the practical meaning of this unforgettable lesson? You shouldn’t betray your friend and drive him to suicide? Really, who doesn’t know that already? It’s just common sense. I think the situation depicted in this novel is personal and unique, rather than universal.”

“All right, fair point. Let’s say there’s a girl you aren’t particularly interested in, but when your friend ends up falling for her you’re surprised to discover that you’re upset about losing someone you didn’t even realize you wanted. When you confess your newfound interest the girl is very receptive, but your friend is so shattered by this development that he kills himself. Do you think such a thing would happen in real life? I mean, seriously, are you guys really so intense at this age? Let’s suppose that scenario did take place, and the woman in question agreed to marry you. If you never got your act together, don’t you think she would eventually leave you? And before that happened, would you really hatch a plan to express the spirit of the modern age by committing ritual suicide?”

The high school students — both the fifteen or so who were onstage and the larger group still sitting in the audience — responded to this fusillade of questions by roaring with laughter. Amid the merriment there was only one person who stood by in disgruntled silence, glowering at the young woman who had subjected him to those queries. That glum-looking person wasn’t a student at all, but rather a member of the comedy duo Suke & Kaku (whom you may remember meeting at the Forest House). Beside him on the stage was the other half of the duo, laughing at his partner’s discomfiture. The woman who had been questioning Suke or Kaku — in the dim light, I couldn’t tell who was who — wasn’t a student, either; it was actually Ricchan, the Caveman Group’s music director. (She has been a friend and mentor to Unaiko ever since Unaiko joined the troupe, and now she’s a friend of mine as well. Despite her seniority, she’s a very low-key, unassuming person, the kind you can always count on in a pinch.) Anyhow, Ricchan — in a costume and hairstyle that made her look much younger — was doing such a convincing job of playing the part of a schoolgirl that I couldn’t help myself. I just had to shout, “Ricchan, you look so cute!”

After a moment, Unaiko came forward and joined the conversation. “Even if it seems a bit ludicrous to describe our modern condition as the ‘spirit of the Heisei Era,’ the famous spirit of Meiji mentioned in Kokoro really is important, so let’s discuss it a bit more later on,” she said. “First, though, I’d like to ask everyone who believes that the book’s narrator (the never-named ‘I’) didn’t learn anything of value from Sensei’s suicide note to assemble on the right side of the stage. Everybody else: left side, please.

“All right, now I have a question for the group on the right. Am I correct in thinking that you don’t believe Sensei was an educator in any real sense of the word, even though he basically staked his life on sharing the lessons you dismiss as useless? If that’s the case, why do you think he made a point of writing a long, confessional letter? Was it just an empty act on his part?”

The person who responded to Unaiko’s question was either Suke or Kaku; it was still too dark for me to tell the two men apart.

“To me, at least, it doesn’t seem to have been an empty act,” he said. “Sensei felt he was living his life as if he were already dead and perpetually beset by the strange, terrible force he talks about so eloquently. After all those years of living with his guilt, maybe he had reached a point where dying seemed to him to be the most natural course of action.”

“Point taken,” Unaiko said. “But if — as some of you believe — Sensei wasn’t acting as a teacher, shall we talk about what you think he was trying to accomplish with the letter he left behind for his young friend?”

At that point, Masao Anai, who had been sitting in the audience, stood up and signaled his desire to speak. I think the gesture might have been a bit of spontaneous ad-libbing on Masao’s part, but I’m not completely sure. Watching this new tactic of dividing the participants into two camps and then revitalizing the discussion by introducing a third line of thought, I got the feeling it was all part of the continuing evolution of the technique they’d used in Tossing the Dead Dogs.

“I’m probably closer to your fathers’ generation than to yours, and I definitely have a lot more years under my belt than you do,” Masao began. “I’m a playwright and a director, and just as the author Kogito Choko, who originally hails from this part of the country, expresses himself through novels, I use the theater as my vehicle for self-expression. I’m constantly thinking about the phenomenon of expression, day in and day out, so if you don’t mind I’d like to talk a bit about the suicide note written by the Sensei character in Kokoro.

“As you know from reading the book, Sensei is hoping his death will kindle a new spark of life in the breast of the young man who is reading his posthumous letter. I was very moved when I read this for the first time as a young man, and I asked myself, ‘Do people really say this sort of thing when they’re about to die?’ Obviously, I was identifying with the narrator and projecting my own thoughts and feelings onto him. And I couldn’t help wondering: ‘How would I feel if someone on the threshold of death was kind enough to write down something like this just for me?’

“But the thing is, as the years have gone by I’ve suffered a sort of sea change, and I’ve noticed that when I reread Kokoro these days I’m not as receptive as I used to be. I find myself asking questions like: ‘Is Sensei giving any thought at all to the effect his words, and his death, will have on this young man who looks up to him and considers him a friend?’ I really don’t think he is; it doesn’t seem to me as if Sensei is ever thinking about anyone except himself. And what’s with the sudden suicide drama, anyway? Until then, Sensei had been quietly living out his years, systematically shutting himself off from society — as we say today, he was holed up like a hermit. By his own admission he was never much of a writer, and this suicide note is his one and only attempt at self-expression. In other words, the only reason he picked up brush and paper was to write his final communiqué.

“Even so, you have to wonder how he could have believed that reading his suicidal confession would cause a new life to be sparked in the heart of the young. This passage has been read aloud already, but for me, the highlight of the farewell note is I’d like you to remember something. This is the way I have lived my life.

“You see, this is how Sensei expresses himself: by basically oversharing with someone who isn’t even part of his inner circle. To be honest, the more I thought about this behavior, the less I liked it. I’m sure some of you must have had the same reaction. Or maybe not?”

At this point, Masao Anai (who had struck a dramatic pose at the end of his monologue) began to be pelted from all sides with “dead dogs.” As the toys rained down on him Masao picked up the stuffed animals that had bounced off his body and landed at his feet. He made a great show of examining them carefully, one by one. Then, clutching a double armload of dogs, he docilely resumed his seat, bowing to the audience around him as if to acknowledge his defeat.

Once again, the audience burst into laughter. Masao’s deliberately bombastic tone had captured the students’ attention, and his pretense of having been both intrigued and humbled by the onslaught of “dead dogs,” too, was a skillful way of neutralizing the tension by making them laugh. They were still chuckling when Unaiko, evidently deciding it was time to intervene, strode down to the front of the stage. Projecting the kind of unruffled dignity you’d expect from an experienced teacher, she attempted to calm the antic, exuberant crowd.

“Let me ask you something, class,” she said. “When you hear people being so critical of the things Sensei wrote, don’t any of you feel like firing back with ‘Yes, but Sensei was on the verge of taking his own life, so maybe it isn’t fair to hold him to normal standards of behavior’? Let’s explore that question together, shall we?”

While she was speaking, Unaiko gestured to Ricchan and the comic duo Suke & Kaku to step out from the two groups of high school students onstage. (Those three were convincingly dressed as students, but by then it must have been clear to the audience that they were grown-up actors pretending to be teenagers.)

“A short while ago, one of you suggested that it was a perfectly natural thing for Sensei to have committed suicide at this point in his life,” Unaiko said. “Would you please explain your thinking based on what’s in the suicide note? And then, for balance, we’ll need to ask the person who was expressing the opposing view to elaborate a bit more. You’ll do that for us, won’t you? Then, after we’ve given a fair hearing to both sides of the argument, I’d like to invite everyone to summon all your strength and throw your ‘dead dogs’ at the faction you don’t agree with!”

In response to Unaiko’s request, Suke began to read aloud from the opened copy of Kokoro he was holding. (Suke’s & Kaku’s faces were helpfully illuminated by the stage lighting now, so I was finally able to tell them apart.)

Sensei: You may wonder why I have chosen to take such a radical way out. But you see, the strange and terrible force that gripped my heart whenever I tried to find an escape in life seemed at last only to leave me free to find escape in death. If I wished to move at all, then I could move only towards my own end.

“This is the sort of thing I had in mind,” Suke said. “Sensei felt that after Emperor Meiji died of natural causes and General Nogi committed suicide to follow his master in death, this unusual set of circumstances had created an opportunity for him to end his own life as well. How is that not natural?”

“Well, okay, but how do you connect the dots between that opportunity and the so-called spirit of Meiji?” inquired Ricchan, still in character as a high school girl. “We know Sensei betrayed his friend, K, so horribly that K couldn’t bear to go on living, and Sensei was haunted by that misdeed for the rest of his life, right? Yet the awareness, however painful, never drove him to commit suicide himself. When he declares, There was nothing I could do, so I decided to go on living as if I were dead, wasn’t he just granting himself a temporary stay of execution? I mean, it seems as if he decided arbitrarily that the reprieve he’d granted himself had finally run out, and he made up his mind the time had come for him to die. And because the spirit of Meiji had effectively perished along with the emperor who gave the era its name, you could say Sensei was simply following that spirit into the valley of death, right? But why does the spirit of Meiji suddenly become a factor at this point? If we’re going to talk about naturalness, is it natural for this phrase to crop up at such a late stage in the story? I mean, until now, both before and after Sensei’s betrayal of his friend, Sensei never really talked about the spirit of Meiji, did he? So why in the world does he suddenly drag that concept into the conversation? Wouldn’t it have been more natural if he’d simply declared that he had lost the will to go on living as if he were already dead and had decided to put an end to his lifelong misery? And what is the spirit of Meiji, anyway? Is it somehow related to the strange and terrible force Sensei invokes, or is it that force’s polar opposite, or what?

“Hang on a minute,” Ricchan said, stopping herself mid-rant. “I’m getting carried away and losing sight of the point I want to make. Okay, here’s what I don’t understand. Are we supposed to believe that all the people who lived through the period of nation building that started with the Meiji Restoration — including Sensei — shared some sort of ideological or spiritual common ground? I see this book as the story of one damaged individual who withdrew from the world because he couldn’t forgive himself for a youthful error in judgment that had unforeseeably tragic consequences. How do you make a connection between one gloomy, introverted person and the bright, shiny ‘spirit of Meiji’ as embodied in all the people who were cheerful, eager, hardworking members of society during that time?”

“The reason you don’t understand is because you’re a woman!” Kaku screamed, storming to the front of the stage. In baseball terms, this rashly chauvinistic (and completely nonsensical) declaration was the wild pitch that lost the game for Suke & Kaku. Within seconds the two comedians were under siege and the air was filled with a flurry of soft-toy dogs aimed directly at them.

The female students who were standing nearby naturally allied themselves with their own gender in the face of such blatant sexism, and they immediately got in on the act by scooping up the “dead dogs” that had landed on the stage around them. However, the girls didn’t heave those missives at Suke & Kaku; instead, they used the stuffed animals to pummel the two actors about their heads and faces, like the aggressors in a particularly violent pillow fight.

An instant later everyone onstage joined the fracas, snatching up the incoming plush toys and slinging them back into the audience with all their might, while continuing to express their opinions in loud voices. It wasn’t long before the scripted play had given way to a festively anarchic fracas. But just as the chaos was reaching its peak the lights were dimmed, transforming the movements of the throng onstage into a sort of shadow play (yet another demonstration of the show’s high production values). At the same time those people’s voices grew gradually fainter, until finally all that could be heard was a passionate, heartfelt whispering, and then the action in the shadow play slowed to a halt as well.

Since a theater in the round doesn’t have a curtain, the illusion of a curtain coming down was created by plunging the stage into total darkness. When the lights came up again, the female high school students, led by Ricchan, were standing there looking very pleased with themselves, while the male scholars on the other side, captained by Suke & Kaku, were crouching down on the stage so that they appeared to be virtually buried under a massive pile of “dead dogs.” This sight evoked an enthusiastic surge of applause and widespread calls for an encore. Once again the stage went dark, and this time when the lights came on Suke & Kaku stood up and loomed over the scrum with stuffed animals dropping around them — a sight greeted by a mixture of applause, laughter, and catcalls. The alternating blackouts and encores went on and on, and almost as an afterthought, innumerable toy dogs continued to be hurled back and forth.

All in all it was a truly extraordinary evening, and everyone agreed that the dog-tossing version of Kokoro was a spectacular success!

Chapter 7. The Aftermath Continues

1

Dear Kogii,

I’ve already told you about the phenomenal success of Unaiko’s play. When I saw her later, I broached an idea that had come to me during the performance and was gratified to find that she shared my enthusiasm.

I’m writing to you about this now because my little epiphany has a direct connection to the Forest House, and I’m hoping very much that you will give this plan your blessing. If my introduction seems excessive, it’s probably because I’m a trifle nervous; I’ve never before asked you for such a large favor, and I may never do so again. Nonetheless, I feel as though I’m putting you on the spot, and that really isn’t my style. As you read this letter, please keep in mind that I was fully conscious of what I was doing and felt very awkward about it.

What originally started me thinking about this in the first place was your decision to abandon the drowning novel. In all honesty, I should say “your decision to do me the favor of abandoning the project.” I won’t pretend I was sorry about that outcome. That’s because when you decided to give up trying to write about our father through the prism of his death, I felt as if I had fulfilled Mother’s final wish, since the possibility you might someday publish that book was something she was very concerned about for a long time. During the ten years since she passed away, I have to confess that I behaved rather duplicitously, although I did have my reasons. The truth is, I knew the materials you needed in order to complete your drowning novel had long since been destroyed, but I needed to hear from your own lips that you had decided to abandon the project based on what you found — or, more precisely, failed to find — in the trunk.

Anyhow, since the drowning novel has finally been flushed away once and for all (yes, I realize that may not be the most tasteful choice of words), I can finally escape from our mother’s long shadow and start to walk alone, on my own. Even as I was becoming aware of that exhilarating possibility, I realized I’d already started to march in step with Unaiko, so to speak.

As you know, I was deeply impressed and inspired by her recent performance, and when I announced that from now on I’d like to pour my energy and resources into helping with her creative projects, her response was very quick and totally positive. Unaiko did take some time to discuss the matter with Ricchan, but she got back to me almost immediately, saying they both agreed it was time for a change, and rather than continuing to work for Masao Anai (or some other man), they would rather team up with a woman like me. Then the three of us had a lovely group hug and laughed about feeling as if we had just graduated from — or perhaps to? — an all-girls school. What I’d like to say to you now is that until recently the unresolved issue of Mother’s red leather trunk was always taking up valuable space in my brain, but from here on out I’m going to be single-mindedly devoting myself to the perpetually evolving Tossing the Dead Dogs project. I’m going to live every day with the aim of supporting Unaiko and her creative work in any way I can. As it happens, this decision of mine coincides with an exciting new stage in Unaiko’s career, and I’m delighted to have the chance to commit my time and abilities, such as they are, to helping her realize her unique artistic vision.

So I guess this is my personal declaration of independence! I know with absolute certainty that I need to free myself from Mother’s influence, and from yours as well, before I can join Unaiko in this adventure. If you were to ask what else I’ve done in my life that felt as challenging as this, I would have to say it was making the movie about a local folk heroine, even though (as you know) Meisuke’s Mother Marches Off to War was never distributed because of contractual problems. But now that I think about it, on that project, too, I was always toiling in your shadow — and Mother’s, too. I mean, you wrote the screenplay, and of course you were the reason we were able to attract an international movie star like Sakura Ogi Magarshack.

For our current undertaking, though, I’m absolutely determined not to be dependent on you in any way. So Unaiko and I are thinking that (if you approve) we would like to enter into a formal contractual agreement with you, as the original author of the screenplay, before we do any more work on turning it into a stage play. Realistically, we wouldn’t be able to get our new enterprise off the ground without your cooperation, but once it gets rolling Unaiko and I should be able to bring her innovative ideas to fruition on our own, as an independent partnership.

Unaiko is considerably younger than I am, but she’s carrying some heavy emotional baggage — things in her past that are far more severe than anything I’ve experienced in my own comparatively sheltered life. I’m talking about seriously dark and damaging violations, the kind you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. As a teenager Unaiko had some truly harrowing experiences, and right now she’s plotting a crucial battle of her own that’s directly connected with a traumatic chapter in her life. I wouldn’t call it a vendetta or a quest for revenge; it’s more like an attempt to obtain a long-overdue measure of justice.

Our dear friend Ricchan, who is a supercapable manager and administrator in addition to being very creative in her own right, will be accompanying Unaiko and me on our journey. Since the time has come for me to emerge from the shadows, I’m excited to be joining forces with Unaiko as we go forth to fight our battles together: mine rather small, hers potentially epic.

I guess this next bit is what movie people call the backstory, but at any rate I think the idea for the giant favor I’m leading up to first began germinating when you mentioned that there will come a time, perhaps quite soon, when you’ll no longer be able to return to the forest, and you asked me to give some thought to how we ought to handle the business aspect of the equation. I started thinking now might be the perfect time to make some changes, so I went down to the town hall and had a chat with one of the clerks.

When we built the Forest House, Mother’s idea was that the land should be in my name, while the house would belong to you. Since Unaiko is planning to strike out on her own and establish her own theater group based on the “tossing the dead dogs” model, I’ve been thinking about what a boon it would be for her to have the use of the Forest House on a more permanent basis. I’m not proposing that you should deed the house over to me — I suspect I’ll eventually need to move somewhere less remote myself. Nor am I suggesting that the property be passed down to my son.

What I’m saying is that I would be very grateful if you would formally bequeath the Forest House to Unaiko. (Naturally I would do the same with my claim to the land it sits on.) In addition, I’d like to ask you to continue paying the property taxes and to subsidize the conversion of the downstairs into a proper rehearsal space — a project that, as you know, is already under way. I know it’s a lot to ask, but would you please consider doing these things, perhaps as a way of compensating me for having looked after the Forest House all these years? Of course, if you should ever want to come to see any of Unaiko’s new productions, or if you ever feel like taking an active part in those projects (and, to be honest, we’re going to be counting on your assistance on the artistic side), or if you simply decide to pay us a visit, you will always be more than welcome to set up camp on the second floor for as long as you like.

As for the timing of this new chapter of Unaiko’s career, something has happened that makes her going solo necessary, and maybe even inevitable. After the success of her recent show — the dog-tossing play built around some of the concepts set forth in Kokoro—she started getting even more flak than usual from the right-wing factions around these parts. At this stage the criticism is still only verbal, but if it should escalate into actual interference she’ll have no choice but to fight back. Because the leader of the Caveman Group, Masao Anai, tries to be apolitical in both his private life and his art, Unaiko needs to make it clear to the public that she is leaving the group and going her own way. Since Unaiko will almost certainly need to borrow some start-up capital from the bank, the question of what she has in the way of assets or property — things that could serve as collateral for a loan — will be crucial. That’s why I’m asking you to give careful consideration to my request, at your very earliest convenience.

2

Dear Kogii,

I’m absolutely thrilled that you agreed to my big request! How can I ever thank you enough? Since my previous letter ended up being a shameless plea for assistance, I’d like to try to make up for that by telling you about what’s been going on, theater-wise, since the beginning of the year, following last fall’s boffo performance at the theater in the round.

After the resounding success of the Kokoro play, Unaiko immediately got to work on a revised version targeted at a more adult audience. She staged the play at a small venue in Matsuyama where avant-garde theater groups from Tokyo appear from time to time, and it was another smash hit. I was particularly impressed by the way Unaiko took some of the critiques of the earlier version of the play, which was tailored to appeal to students, and cleverly found a way to incorporate those responses into her revised script.

Until now, I’ve mostly been sending you brief descriptions and on-the-scene reports, but I’d like to give you a broader sense of what’s taking place in the theater during one of Unaiko’s plays. (Although I think it would be difficult for an accomplished journalist, much less an amateur like me, to write an account that does justice to the entire panorama; I mean, there are so many different things going on at the same time while the performance unfolds.) I would also like to try to evoke the distinctive atmosphere of freshness, openness, and unpredictability Unaiko brings to all her productions.

As I’ve mentioned before, lively, unscripted arguments and discussions often erupt spontaneously among the actors onstage and the animated interplay spills over into the audience as well, drawing the spectators into the action. Meanwhile, Unaiko is making a continuous effort to monitor everything that’s going on. (It’s truly phenomenal the way she’s able to focus on several conversations simultaneously; I can’t help being reminded of Prince Shotoku, with his legendary facility for listening to individual requests or complaints from ten citizens at once!) At any rate, she’ll usually beckon two or three interesting-looking participants from the audience to join her at the front of the stage. Then some of the established performers from the troupe will take the new arrivals under their wings and offer vocal support for whatever opinions the newcomers might be expressing.

Of course, this sort of interactive approach—’blurring the usually clear demarcation between performers and audience — is at the heart of Unaiko’s theatrical modus operandi. However, she runs a tight ship, and when a side discussion that seemed to be heading in an interesting direction begins to lose steam, the people in that group will soon find themselves the targets of a dismissive hail of stuffed animals.

On opening night at the cozy little theater in Matsuyama, one of the first audience members to be invited onstage by Unaiko was an acquaintance of mine, a high school teacher from Honcho. (He also came to see the initial Kokoro performance last fall.) The teacher started by pointing out that at the beginning of the play an actor was speaking as Sensei himself, in the first person. However, when it came time to quote from Sensei’s suicide note, the monologue was voiced in the third person. The teacher’s complaint was that because the Sensei character didn’t actively participate in the discussion, it simply wasn’t as effective or entertaining as when that pivotal character was speaking as himself.

My acquaintance was immediately heckled by people saying things like “Wasn’t that as it should be, since Sensei had already committed suicide?” He didn’t back down, though. “So what if Sensei had already killed himself?” he retorted. “Why couldn’t he be sent onstage as someone who’s dead, like the ghost in Hamlet? I mean, it’s a play, right?” He even offered a concrete suggestion: “I noticed a wheelchair out in the lobby,” he said. “Couldn’t you seat an actor representing Sensei in the wheelchair, with his head and face covered by a cloth to let us know he was supposed to be dead? Then when someone asked him a question, he could reply in his own voice! That would be some gripping theater. Personally, I’d like to call the deceased Sensei back to this dimension from wherever he is now and ask him some tough questions, and based on conversations I’ve had here tonight I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way.” I’m not quoting verbatim, of course, but that’s the gist of what the teacher said.

And voilà—no sooner said than done! Seriously, I was amazed. It took Unaiko only a few minutes to implement the teacher’s suggestions, and in the interlude I could feel the audience’s growing excitement about this bit of improvised stagecraft. While we watched, the wheelchair was carried onstage, and after Suke & Kaku had thrown a white cloth over Unaiko’s head they seated her in the chair and pushed it into the center of the stage. From then on the high school teacher — whose request had set this impromptu scenario in motion — had no choice but to address his questions to the “corpse.”

“Sensei,” he said, “I’d like to ask about your final letter, or suicide note, which I’ve read many times along with my students. The thing is, when it comes to making statements about this nation of ours in a public high school in the twenty-first century, an educator has to be extremely circumspect. About six months ago, when this same play was staged in our little town for an audience that included both students and regular citizens — and I’d appreciate it if you would make a point of remembering that I used the word ‘citizens’ rather than ‘townspeople’—anyhow, while a number of students and citizens did participate in the performance, I decided to keep my comments to myself. Today, before I say anything, I’d like to emphasize the fact that I’m here on my own, as a theatergoer. I am not speaking as I would in the classroom.

“In case you might wonder to whom the disclaimer is addressed, the answer is: to the members of the school board in the town where I teach. They have made a special trip up here to Matsuyama this evening just to see this play. Because the previous performance at our local junior high gave rise to some very public controversy, I imagine the board members wanted to see for themselves what all the fuss was about. Take a good look at these people; I think you’ll agree that they aren’t the sort who would normally come to an experimental performance in a small theater like this.

“I’d like to begin by talking about what happened when this play was performed in the town where we live. The original plan was to combine the play with a lecture by Kogito Choko, the novelist who was one of the first students to enter the new postwar junior high in our village. However, because Mr. Choko was sidelined with an attack of vertigo — which was completely understandable, since whenever we try to read his convoluted sentences I think we all start to feel a bit dizzy, too [laughter]—anyhow, the planning committee decided to go ahead and present the play as a stand-alone event.

“From the perspective of the school board that outcome may actually have been preferable, politically speaking. Why? Because as a writer, Kogito Choko has shown a deep emotional attachment to the archaic version of the Fundamental Law of Education. Back in the prewar era there were students who were unable to advance to the next educational level because of family finances, and that’s why a new junior high was built in the village. Mr. Choko was one of the students who benefited. The school was created according to the postwar principles embodied in the New Constitution and the revised — some might say watered-down — version of the Fundamental Law of Education. At the time laws were being modified left and right, and Mr. Choko suggested that everyone ought to make the original Fundamental Law of Education into pamphlets, to carry around in our breast pockets. He even had a bunch of those booklets printed at his own expense, but apparently they didn’t sell too well — you know, not like novels. Or maybe I should say they sold about as well as Mr. Choko’s own novels. [Laughter.] I was one of the people who actually purchased some of those booklets, so if you don’t mind I’d like to read an excerpt from the one I just happen to have in my pocket.”

At this point, the teacher began to read aloud, but the passage he’d chosen ventured so deeply into the intricacies of educational politics that the audience around me started to fidget in obvious boredom and impatience. He must have sensed this because he stopped reading and said, a bit sheepishly, “Anyhow, the bottom line is that we have to tread carefully whenever we talk about the topic of education. Why, tonight alone three people have already thrown ‘dead dogs’ at me, so I’ll move on to my main point before I get hit again.

“It has to do with the note Sensei left behind, in which he wrote: Then, during the height of the summer, Emperor Meiji passed away. I felt as though the spirit of the Meiji Era that began with the emperor had ended with him as well. I was overcome with the feeling that I and the rest of my generation, who had grown up in that era, were now left behind to live as anachronisms. I shared this epiphany with my wife, but she just laughed and refused to take me seriously. Then she said a curious thing, albeit in jest: ‘Well then, maybe you should just go ahead and commit junshi, and follow the emperor to the grave.’”

After he finished reading, the teacher addressed the shrouded figure in the wheelchair. “Sensei, when you said that to your wife she laughed at you and didn’t seem to take you seriously at all. She even teased you, saying, ‘Maybe you should just go ahead and commit junshi.’ On this point, I have to say I really — I don’t mean to give you a hard time about this, but it just struck me as extremely odd. And that’s why I would like to go back in time and ask for some clarification. You talk about how strongly you and your contemporaries were influenced by the spirit of the Meiji Era, but is that true? Your friend was driven to commit suicide as a direct result of your betrayal, yet that betrayal sprang from your own character and the choices you made, so you couldn’t really blame your behavior on the sensibilities of the Meiji Era, could you? And as a result of your youthful error, isn’t it true that you ended up more or less dropping out of society for personal reasons and then living for many years as if you were already dead, as you put it? In any case, I don’t believe your private motivations were shaped by the spirit of the era — although I wouldn’t presume to say you were entirely removed from the influence of the society and the era you were living in, either.

“No, I think what moved you to behave as you did was your own secret heart. You speak repeatedly of a strange and terrible force. But didn’t the force originate in your soul, or in your gut, rather than somewhere external? Even so, your conviction that the spirit of Meiji was alive in your psyche doesn’t seem far-fetched to me at all; I just don’t believe it was the primary motivation for anything you did.

“Then there’s the matter of your long-suffering wife. She may appear to be a rather unworldly and submissive person, but the fact is she’s still a full-fledged member of the sibylline tribe known as womankind. Think about her life for a moment: spending every day and night with a man who doesn’t go to work and stays cooped up at home, a man who is immobilized by a mysterious force he can’t talk about, even to his spouse. When a man like that blurts out something grandiose and melodramatic about killing himself, wouldn’t his wife simply laugh it off? I think she would. And when she says, ‘Well then, maybe you should just go ahead and commit junshi’—I mean, isn’t it possible she wasn’t joking at all? Maybe she was just fed up.”

Kogii, at this point, without thinking, I spontaneously stood up and started clapping. And I wasn’t the only one — at least a third of the spectators in the theater applauded too, and some even jumped up and waved their arms in the air. That was the kind of passionate response the teacher’s speech evoked.

However, in the very back of the theater (it was completely sold out for once) there were three or four men dressed in trench coats. They started swinging “dead dogs” in circles above their heads with an ominous whistling sound, evidently as a way of declaring their objections to what the high school teacher had said. (I don’t know; maybe they felt throwing the dogs right away would somehow diminish the impact of their protest?) I won’t say those men were members of the school board, but they were most likely from the same camp, ideologically speaking. I can say with certainty that they were people who had heard about what happened at the junior high school last fall and had come to see for themselves. To save time, I’ll compress their remarks and bundle the speakers into one, under the generic name “Citizen.”

“Are you questioning Sensei’s feeling that the Meiji Era began and ended with Emperor Meiji? I mean, Sensei stated clearly that he and his contemporaries were profoundly influenced by the essence of Meiji, didn’t he? So it rings true that he really did commit junshi out of solidarity with the spirit of his age. Are you trying to disparage this noble death?”

And with that, the citizens hurled their “dead dogs” in the direction of the high school teacher. However, most of the people in the audience (including a great many young people) apparently sided with the teacher’s point of view, because they responded by sending a hailstorm of stuffed animals in the direction of the citizens — an attack that had both numbers and energy on its side. In the midst of the jubilant chaos, Unaiko, who had been sitting motionless in the wheelchair, still in character as the late Sensei, suddenly leaped to her feet. She tore off the white cloth covering her head, revealing a corpselike face made up to appear, quite literally, deathly pale. A hush fell over the small theater as Unaiko began to speak, displaying her superb talent for recitation. Using the same voice she had employed when she was pretending to be Sensei, she started to talk about the character in the third person.

“I’ve been playing the role of Sensei, but I still don’t understand what’s in the ‘secret heart’ of this character whose costume I’m wearing right now. I’m not sure whether he even understood himself. For me, this quote says it all.”

Sensei: I read in the newspaper the words General Nogi had written before killing himself. I learned that ever since the Seinan War, when he lost his banner to the enemy, he had been wanting to redeem his honor through death. I found myself automatically counting the years that the general had lived, always with death at the back of his mind. The Seinan War, as you know, took place in the tenth year of Meiji, so he must have spent thirty-five years waiting for the proper time to die. I asked myself: “When did he suffer greater agony — during those thirty-five years, or at the moment when the sword entered his bowels?”

It was two or three days later that I decided at last to commit suicide. Perhaps you will not understand clearly why I am about to die, any more than I can fully understand why General Nogi killed himself. You and I belong to different eras, and so we think differently. There is nothing we can do to bridge the gap between us. Of course, it might be more accurate to say that we are different simply because we are two separate human beings. At any rate, I have done my best in the above narrative to make you understand the strange person that is myself.

After delivering this long quote, Unaiko addressed the crowd directly, in her own words. “Look, I think for Sensei … as this quote says, he was perpetually obsessed with the question of the human heart — of the individual, by the individual, for the individual — and after having done his best to make his young friend understand this, he took his own life. But how can it be seen as a sacrifice on the altar of the spirit of Meiji? I keep going back to the idea that Sensei ultimately committed suicide as a kind of belated atonement, which is to say he did it for himself. If you agree, please feel free to throw as many ‘dead dogs’ as you like at those citizens in the audience who take a different view. Go ahead, everybody — knock yourselves out!”

3

Dear Kogii,

Until now I’ve mostly been writing to you about artistic projects and practical matters, but this letter is going to be much more personal. Of course, you probably have a pretty good idea of what I’m talking about. As you can imagine, the news I’ve just heard from Chikashi came as a tremendous shock, especially since it doesn’t involve one family crisis, but two.

Not only is your relationship with Akari at its lowest point ever, but Chikashi has recently been diagnosed with a serious illness. Fortunately, it sounds as though the doctors are optimistic about her prospects for recovery, which seems like a welcome ray of hope. As someone who worked as a nurse for many years, I know that while doctors sometimes withhold information and say only what they think a patient wants to hear, they wouldn’t resort to that type of sugarcoated subterfuge for someone as strong-minded as Chikashi.

Needless to say, you’re already fully aware of these very grave situations, and I must say I was surprised that you didn’t tell me what was going on with Akari. Instead, Chikashi, who is probably tired of watching you mope around, took the initiative and sent me a calm, rational account, which struck me as a perfectly appropriate thing to do. I can’t help remembering that you agreed to keep me abreast of any new developments after your return to Tokyo, and the deal was that instead of writing letters you would write things down on cards and someone would send me copies. You’ve been quite good about reporting on your recuperation from the Big Vertigo, but you didn’t say a single word about what happened between you and Akari.

Look, I know you’re upset because your relationship with Akari seems to be in an unprecedentedly precarious state, and it’s only natural for you to feel ashamed since it was your own behavior that created this mess. But we had a deal, and I was disappointed when Chikashi told me you’ve been writing detailed entries about this situation on the index cards you use instead of a diary, but you apparently instructed Maki (who has been transcribing selected notes on a computer and sending them via email) not to share them with me.

Speaking of Chikashi, how do you propose to deal with her illness? Because of the way you’ve been behaving recently, I don’t feel I can rely on you. I gather that Maki will be going over to your house and attending to the household chores, but Chikashi wrote that she would like to ask me, as an experienced nurse, to come up to Tokyo and lend a hand during her stay at the hospital as well as later, when she is recuperating at home. It goes without saying that I’ll be more than willing to do anything I can to help.

However, your strained relations with Akari are almost as concerning to me as Chikashi’s battle against cancer. To begin with, I gather you’re expecting Maki to handle the household matters and the administrative aspects of your professional work, and she can’t very well attend to Akari’s needs, too, while Chikashi is sidelined. Also, if Maki starts to feel stressed about having too many things to deal with, her chronic depression could flare up again.

As I was trying to figure out the best way to address the troubling issues raised in Chikashi’s letter, I received a typically thoughtful call about those very matters from Chikashi herself. She waited until I had finished mumbling my greetings and expressions of sympathy, and then she got right down to business. She didn’t sound like a patient at all; her way of speaking about her illness was completely pragmatic and unemotional. I know your family doctor has already briefed you on Chikashi’s medical situation, so I won’t repeat those details here.

Because Chikashi is the kind of person she is, before she called me she already knew exactly what she wanted. She confirmed that she wanted me to come to Tokyo and lend a hand in my capacity as a nurse, and she also said she’d like to send you and Akari down to Shikoku to spend some time in the forest. She had thought through all the details — that’s just her style — and I was happy that she felt she could depend on me. I was immediately on board with both facets of the plan, and I’ve already spoken with Unaiko and Ricchan about looking after you and Akari while you’re at the Forest House, once I’ve moved up to Tokyo to act as Chikashi’s private nurse. (That’s just my style.)

Here’s the thing, Kogii: Chikashi mentioned that Akari hasn’t been listening to music for the past six months or so. That news was almost as shocking to me as her cancer diagnosis, because music has been the most important thing in Akari’s life for as long as I can remember. Really, I haven’t felt so blindsided by anything since Goro committed suicide.

I think anyone who knows you could have predicted that you would be monumentally depressed after deciding to scrap your drowning novel, and the Big Vertigo may have affected your behavior as well. Even so, there’s no excuse for treating Akari the way you did. If Mother were still around, I can almost hear her saying something like “That’s downright disgraceful!” Medical explanations aside, you are a hundred percent responsible for everything you said to Akari and for the effect those horrible words have had on him. But I also know that apart from Akari, you’re the one who has been hurt the most by this, and I can’t help feeling very sad for you both. To be honest, though, I can’t get over what you did. I mean, how could you have behaved so heartlessly?

Chikashi talked about that situation, too, in her trademark cool, calm, and collected manner. She only got emotional about one thing, when she confided in me that she was very worried about what might happen from now on between you and Akari. When I heard that, I just kind of blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

“Chikashi,” I said, “in a situation like this, all you can do is bide your time. I mean, um, it’s like the period a while back when Akari stopped working on his compositions …” (Now every time I think about my glib, meaningless words, I get so mad at myself that I have to get up and pace around like a caged animal. And again, I just feel so terribly sad about everything that’s going on.)

I could tell Chikashi was disturbed by my comment, but she replied coolly and calmly as usual: “In that situation, Akari stopped composing of his own free will, and when he started again it was also by his own choice. In both cases, he was in control of his own destiny. I’ll admit that when I thought he might never write another composition I felt utterly devastated, but the decision was Akari’s and I had no choice but to accept it. Also, during that time Akari was still listening to music, both on CDs and on the radio.

“But the way things are at present, some truly terrible words have been spoken, and they can never be forgotten or unsaid. It seems as though Akari has decided that he no longer wants anything to do with this family and with Papa in particular. We’ve never experienced a crisis even remotely like this, and the strangest thing of all, for me, is to be living in a house that isn’t constantly filled with music.”

Since I don’t always learn from my mistakes, this was my ill-considered response: “How would it be if you tried playing CDs of Mozart and Bach and so on at low volume, when my brother is away from the house?”

“But why should Akari need to behave in such a furtive manner? Or are you saying that I should just put on some random CDs and force the issue?” Chikashi asked sternly. I pictured her normally serene face with the brow furrowed in an expression of disapproval, and it gave me a chill. To my relief, she continued in a neutral, reflective tone, almost as if she was talking to herself. “I appreciate the suggestion, but music has always been Akari’s domain, and I’m afraid having me fill our silent house with my own choices could make the situation even more uncomfortable than it already is.”

Unfortunately, after having had my clumsy faux pas redeemed by Chikashi’s generosity of spirit — she is always so extraordinarily gracious, even in the midst of her own travails — I ended up saying something that I fear was even more irritating.

“You mentioned that there’s never before been such a serious rift between Akari and my brother, but hasn’t Kogii tried to repair the damage?” I asked. “In the past, if things had ever gotten to this point, it seems to me that everyone would have gone all out to get the situation back to normal. I mean, if you read Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! …” I trailed off.

Chikashi responded to my question in a tone I’d never heard from her before. Until then she had been referring to you as “Papa,” and hearing her suddenly switch to calling you “that man” made my blood run cold. The things she said were so rigorous and unforgiving that I must have somehow rearranged the words in my mind afterward as a defense mechanism. However, I haven’t been able to forget the underlying message.

In essence, this is what she said: “That man’s way of extending a conciliatory hand to Akari is shallow and superficial; I won’t go so far as to say it’s disingenuous, but even if such an approach has occasionally been effective in the past, hasn’t that man’s oppression of Akari been part of the problem all along? True, that man has some little tricks that have been useful for patching up minor rifts in the past, but if he tries to deploy them now, when his relationship with Akari has reached a complete impasse — well, the truth is it won’t work, and I don’t even want him to try. He sits around drinking and stewing about the situation, and does impulsive things like rushing out to buy new CDs he thinks might interest Akari and bringing them home as a peace offering. I really wish he would refrain from doing that sort of thing as well. As you know, music has been the single most important element in Akari’s life practically forever. The basic principle of listening to music of his own free will must be preserved no matter what. And in order to make sure his freedom to listen to music is protected, his freedom not to listen to music must be respected as well. To borrow one of that man’s favorite phrases — doesn’t it come down to fundamental human rights? If he somehow decided to force Akari to listen to music against his will, as yet another form of oppression, it could do irrevocable damage to Akari, psychologically. It’s even possible that Akari might express his opposition by violently lashing out at that man in an unprecedented way.

“By the way, what I said just now? I actually borrowed some of the phrasing from Maki, but the things she said echoed what I had been thinking on my own. If things go on like this Maki might end up taking Akari away to live at her house, and I’m not sure I could oppose such a plan, in good conscience.”

At this point Chikashi seemed to sense that my hands were trembling uncontrollably on the other end of the line, and she stopped referring to you as “that man,” which I had found extremely distressing.

“I’ve been going around saying that our house in Seijo is inhabited by two giant lumps of depression, and when I think of those two being alone together in their current state, it really frightens me,” she went on. “So before I check in to the hospital, I’d like to send them away to a place where they might have a better chance of figuring out how to live together with at least a modicum of peace and harmony. And for Papa, being on Shikoku surrounded by his beloved forest would be very restorative, don’t you agree? I’m afraid setting things up would involve imposing on you even more — I mean, I’m already asking you to come to Tokyo and nurse me through my recovery—’but if you don’t mind, that’s how I’d like to handle it.”

Chikashi’s courteous words at the end of our conversation made me feel better about the critical things she had said about you, but after I hung up the phone the sound of her fierce soliloquy was still ringing in my ears. I couldn’t bear to stay at home alone so I headed over to the Forest House, hoping to talk to Unaiko. However, she wasn’t there — apparently she and Ricchan were both taking care of some business matters — and the house was closed up tight. Since I hadn’t brought my key, I went around to the back garden, sat down in front of the poetry stone, and looked at the lines Mother wrote: You didn’t get Kogii ready to go up into the forest / And like the river current, you won’t return home.

Kogii, what you’re doing now is even worse than that, isn’t it? There’s no point in raking you over the coals, but we both know you’re in a far more dire situation now than when you wrote your part of that poem: In Tokyo during the dry season / I’m remembering everything backward, / From old age to earliest childhood.

I hope you’ll listen carefully to whatever Chikashi and Maki have to say, and please, please don’t even think about doing anything rash. When I mention the need for caution, I’m talking about two aspects of your current situation. First, now that the ill-fated drowning novel has come to naught, I’m afraid the resulting disappointment may have severed the only work-related bond connecting you to this world. Then, on the personal side of the equation, there’s the deplorable situation with Akari. The two of you have been practically joined at the hip for all these years, and that link seems to have been sundered as well. At this point, I’m worried that you may be asking yourself whether you have any ties to this life anymore. So I just want to ask you to be very careful not to fall into the kind of tediously nihilistic, self-destructive state of mind old people are especially vulnerable to, because we both know where it can lead.

Needless to say, I won’t be expecting an actual letter in reply to this. However, I will be looking forward to receiving Maki’s copies of any notes you might scribble on your ubiquitous index cards.

4

Some notes from my index cards:

Basically, I think the way Akari has made it through life until now — it’s hard for me to believe, but he is already forty-five years old — is by creating a world where the interconnected activities of listening to classical music and creating his own brief yet beguiling compositions have formed a stable foundation for his daily existence … that is, until the recent catastrophic turn of events.

Akari has four successful CDs of original music to his credit, and his uncle Goro even made a film based on my novels about our home life, both of which (the life and the books) revolved around Akari. When Akari was taking music lessons from an expert in the field, he never shirked his studies. This process was interrupted when he took an extended break from composing, but after a couple of years he resumed his study of music theory with the same diligence. Every day the communal living area of our house was filled with the sound of recorded music, played at low volume: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and even some Messiaen and Piazzolla thrown into the mix from time to time. For years, the music Akari played was the sound track of our lives.

And now all that sublime classical music has completely vanished from our home. Oh, Akari still checks the program listings in the weekly FM radio guide, and he hasn’t abandoned his daily self-set task of correcting any misprints in the composers’ names or titles of works in the programming details at the back of the monthly music magazines. There has been no change in his customary routine of constantly reorganizing his shelves of CDs in accordance with the complex taxonomic principles he seems to keep in his head. However, during the past six months there hasn’t been a single moment when Akari enlivened the space we share with the sounds of classical music. As Chikashi put it, with her usual succinctness, our son has turned into a musical recluse. He listens to music only late at night when he is alone in his room, using headphones connected to his radio, as if he wants to keep it all to himself.

So what is at the root of this sadness and silence and turmoil? The words I rashly spoke to Akari in an unpardonable fit of anger: “You’re an idiot.” That short, simple declarative sentence … the epitome of unreflective cruelty.

Many years ago, in a grove of Erman’s birches in North Karuizawa, I was carrying Akari piggyback when he uttered the first words of his young life in response to hearing the call of a bird on a nearby lake. “It’s a water rail,” he said clearly. (He had already learned to recognize and mimic the songs of a variety of wild birds from a recording we had at home.)

From that point on Akari’s vocabulary grew at a rapid rate, and within three or four years he was able to understand the discriminatory slurs and insults the outside world flung his way. I remember one time when Maki came home from middle school and immediately ran into the kitchen to tell Chikashi about how she had gone to pick Akari up after his special education class and had found him being taunted by a menacing group of older male students. Akari, meanwhile, was in the living room listening to music, and when I peeked in I saw him with both hands clamped over his ears and his elbows sticking out at right angles, obviously trying to filter the unpleasant “noise pollution” of what his sister was saying while still continuing to listen to his beloved music.

And now Akari has evidently reclassified his own father from trusted protector to source of discordant noise and pain: someone who would hurl the most hurtful word imaginable at his own son more than once. This situation has already been festering for half a year, and it could easily continue for another six months — perhaps even a year or two. The truth is, at times even those rather bleak estimates seem wildly optimistic. There is a distinct possibility that Akari and I could go on sharing a living space in which the sound of music is never heard for the next ten or fifteen years, or more.

5

Dear Kogii,

Maki is always very accommodating and easy to deal with, and she kindly took your reflections on the rift between you and Akari, transcribed their index cards on her computer, and emailed them to me. I don’t know whether she was trying to balance the mournful tone of your contributions, but she also included some letters Chikashi wrote to you. I’m sure you read them at the time and wrote proper replies, but because Maki sent me the originals of those letters (rather than photocopies) you no longer have them at hand, so I’ll fax them back to you just in case you might want to take another look. Here’s the first one, which I found very interesting:

I recently remembered a day, many years ago, when you read a letter from one of your young readers and then went into your study without a word and stretched out on your army cot. The memory was triggered the other afternoon when I noticed a book you had been reading next to the chaise longue. (You had gone off to get a haircut while I was getting ready to head for the hospital alone to check myself in, as we’d agreed.) The book had a handmade dust cover, and when I opened it and took a peek at the title page, I saw that it was Soseki’s Kokoro.

Anyway, the young reader — this was when you were quite young yourself, so that person was probably only ten years your junior at most — was responding to a short essay of yours that appeared in one of those little publishing-company advertising brochures they give away at bookstores and university co-ops. The title was a quote from Kokoro: I’d like you to remember something. This is the way I have lived my life. Apparently after reading the essay (or, at least, after glancing at the title) the student scrawled some rude remarks — things like “Who do you think you’re talking to, anyway? Why should I waste my time remembering how you’ve lived your life? As if I cared!”—on a page torn out of a school notebook and mailed it to you. The student’s comments struck me as oddly reasonable and I inadvertently burst out laughing, which just made you more depressed. (I could tell, even though you didn’t say anything.)

Getting back to the present, before I left for the hospital I wandered around the rooms on the second floor of our house. As I was looking at the shelves in the library where all your books are lined up, I remembered the indignant reaction of the young reader (now presumably grown old) to your Kokoro quotation and it made me giggle again, even though it isn’t a particularly pleasant memory. In any event, my little tour of your bookshelves gave me an idea, and I’d like to ask for a favor. Would you please copy out the parts of your novels where you quote things Akari has said and send them to me? I thought maybe I could ask Maki to make those excerpts into a miniature book, using a nice, clean-looking Mincho typeface on her computer (which she insists is already outmoded). Then she could finish them by hand.

I have to say, I’m feeling very optimistic about our chances of weathering the current storm. In the past, whenever we’ve had to deal with a crisis of any magnitude I have always felt we would make it through somehow, and we’ve done just that, every single time. Upon reflection, everyone in our family, including Akari (aside from the disabilities he was born with), has been blessed with fundamentally healthy bodies. Do you remember the famous aphorism Musumi Sensei translated so precisely from the Latin, Mens sana in corpore sano, adding his own observation that a sound mind can easily coexist with an unhealthy body, and vice versa? That’s probably true, but — no, I’m going to resist the temptation to point out that we’re both growing old and before long our crises will be at an end. I would rather be positive and borrow a phrase of Céline’s that you once translated, aeons ago: “Let’s keep our chins up and be of good cheer!”

The truth is, when I glanced over those books in the library I couldn’t help thinking (like the young reader) that being told to “please remember all this” was, indeed, a rather tall order. Of course, I stopped reading your novels somewhere around the middle of Letters to a Nostalgic Time—though I did continue reading your essays, since I illustrated the bulk of them. But anyway … you know how Soseki writes that Sensei found himself automatically tallying the years on his fingers? Well, when I did that just now I realized it’s been twenty years since I decided to stop reading your fiction. And even now, to be honest, I don’t feel any desire to use my downtime in the hospital to catch up on your books.

That’s why I’d like to ask you to go through your work and extract the passages where you quote things Akari has said. I remember you once told me in all seriousness that you write down Akari’s comments verbatim, without embellishment, because you can’t very well hand over the rough draft and ask him whether he wants to make any corrections.

6

Dear Kogii,

Maki sent me a copy of the charming little My Own Words book she put together after you went through your novels and picked out a number of the quotes attributed to Akari. (Of course, his remarks would have been easy to spot because they were always in bold type — or in italics, in the English translations.)

Unaiko was completely enchanted with the compilation, from the very first page, and she’s been running around quoting from it ever since. However, Maki enclosed a note saying that she didn’t necessarily agree with the way you chose the excerpts, although I gather she hasn’t shared those thoughts with you directly.

Chikashi once told me that Maki was very outgoing and vivacious as a young child but her personality suddenly changed when she was halfway through middle school, and she became much more subdued and withdrawn. Also, she started having bouts of extreme melancholy and she would just say whatever she was thinking, without any of the customary filters. I remember the conventional wisdom in the nursing community at the time was that many antidepressants contained an ingredient that could cause an abnormal degree of aggressiveness in patients. In any event, I know Maki is taking antidepressants now, and I’m telling you this because I think it may be relevant to what’s going on between the two of you.

In her note, Maki expressed the opinion that there have been many other times when you were very controlling toward Akari. (She used the word “oppression,” which seems to keep popping up.) She reminded me of a time you described in your autobiographical novel Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! when you went over to Europe, during the rise of the grassroots antinuclear protest movement there, to participate in the making of a television documentary. You ended up staying quite a bit longer than expected, and Akari became convinced you were dead. “Is that right? Is he coming back on Sunday? Even if he is, right now he’s dead! Papa is really dead!”

Of course you know this story better than anyone. Anyhow, in the book Akari started talking back to his mother, who was very much alive. He kept responding to her questions in a belligerent way, and when the father finally did get home he gave Akari a good scolding, and that triggered a rift between them. However, not long afterward, when the father was laid up with an acute attack of gout, Akari addressed his dad — whose ailment had temporarily transformed him into the weakest member of the family — through the intermediary of the father’s badly swollen feet. As a result, amicable relations were restored, both in the book and in real life, but as Maki points out there are some significant differences between that situation and what’s going on now. On second thought, I’m just going to copy the rest of what she said instead of trying to paraphrase:

If Mama is hoping to orchestrate some kind of peaceful accord, like what happened before, and if Papa created this little book of Akari’s quotations in the hopes that it will miraculously smooth things over, then they’re both being way too optimistic. If Papa really thinks the same approach will work this time, when the damage is so much more severe, it only shows that his oppressive attitude toward Akari hasn’t changed a bit. At least that’s how it seems to me. And isn’t this exactly what Mama has been talking about all along as well?

Those were Maki’s main points, but she ended her note by raising an interesting question: “Don’t you think everyone’s getting a kick out of the My Own Words booklet just because of the unique way Akari uses language?”

Since Chikashi went into the hospital earlier than expected and I wasn’t able to adjust my own departure date to accommodate the change, I’ve been talking to Maki on the phone quite frequently these days about various practical matters. During one of those conversations I mentioned offhandedly that I would be interested in hearing an explanation of the rationale behind the harsh things she’s been saying about you lately and her unforgiving attitude toward you in general. I had heard from Chikashi about how rough things were at your house, but I didn’t really understand what was going on.

Maki was completely candid. She told me, “Papa flung some unspeakably cruel words at Akari, not once but twice. The first incident was bad enough, but there’s no way he can forgive himself for letting it happen again. Papa knows this is an intolerable situation, and I’m sure he’s been trying to figure out how to make it better, but suppose Papa and Akari don’t manage to work things out this time and they just go on living completely separate lives. Would that really be so bad? Akari could come live with me. I’ve been talking to Mama about that solution, too.”

That seems to be where Maki stands right now. As I see it, we might be able to make allowances for the first incident by saying that when Akari innocently defaced the flawless Beethoven score — a memento of your friendship with Edward W. Said — you were so upset that you simply lost control of yourself. However, the second lapse is a different story. I mean, you had already gone to bed, but you got up and made a special trip downstairs to confront Akari, and then you called him that shocking name again. True, it was the middle of the night and you were probably under the influence of your usual nightcap. Even so, there’s no excuse for such appalling behavior, and I was literally speechless when I heard about it.

I don’t want to end on an unpleasant topic, so let’s get back to the delightful little book Maki assembled. As I said earlier, Akari’s quotations made a deep impression on Unaiko. She and Ricchan have both been working very hard to get everything ready for when you and Akari arrive, but even though Unaiko already knows you fairly well she told me she’s been feeling nervous about meeting Akari, so she gave the little booklet an extra-careful reading. I gather she has also been trying to formulate a strategy that could lead to an eventual reconciliation between you and Akari. Apparently she found a glimmer of hope in the passage where your foot was inflamed and swollen from gout, and Akari’s response was so sweetly solicitous. She thinks that scene has great dramatic potential, too, although she was saying they would need to find a way to make a stuffed-toy likeness of your gouty foot!

This is Unaiko’s take on the scene, which she analyzed with her usual intensity: the head of the household, who is the family’s authority figure, is angry at Akari, who, in turn, is going through a rebellious stage. Even so, he wants to make peace with his father, but he doesn’t have the courage to address his conciliatory gestures to the more central parts of his father’s anatomy — especially the angry face, which he finds frightening. However, the red, swollen, gout-ridden feet that are causing the father so much suffering are peripheral and therefore, somehow, easier to approach. Also, those feet seem to be staging a mutiny of their own against the more entitled and politically powerful parts of the body, so Akari feels he can engage with those extremities and speak to them directly with affection and concern. “Foot, are you all right? Good foot, nice foot! Gout, are you all right? Nice foot! Nice foot!” Unaiko found that section very moving. Of course, she sees everything from a theatrical perspective, and she said Akari’s touching speech to his father’s feet is an unusually deep expression of his own complicated feelings, the likes of which she’s never seen on any stage.

My recent letters to you must have seemed like an endless barrage of criticism, I know, so I’d like to end by reminding you of another nice passage in the same novel, where it’s clear that Akari is worrying more about his father than about himself. Since you didn’t choose to include those lines in your compilation, I’m planning to write them in the miniature book Maki sent me. I’ll include them here as well, on the chance they might make you feel better.

“Can’t you sleep, Papa? I wonder if you’ll be able to sleep when I’m not here. I expect you to cheer up and sleep!”

Well then, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you when our paths cross at Haneda Airport. I’m glad we were able to arrange it so I’ll be flying into Tokyo right around the time you and Akari are taking off for Shikoku!

Chapter 8. Gishi-Gishi/Mr. Rhubarb

1

As the day of Chikashi’s surgery approached I headed back to my original home turf, the rustic valley deep in the forests of Shikoku, this time with Akari in tow. Asa was by my wife’s side at the hospital; both Chikashi and our daughter, Maki, acknowledged that no one was better qualified to see Chikashi through the surgery and the subsequent recovery period than my sister, who had spent more than half her life working as a nurse.

Maki, meanwhile, would be at our house in the Seijo district of Tokyo, holding down the domestic fort and dealing with incoming correspondence regarding copyrights, writing commissions, and miscellaneous business matters. Akari’s preference would naturally have been to stay home and keep Maki company. However, Chikashi (who couldn’t stop worrying about the precarious state of my relationship with Akari) believed the two of us might find it healing to spend some time together on Shikoku, and she almost seemed more concerned with advancing the plan than with her own impending surgery. Maki somehow managed to convince her brother that this was the best option, and while Akari must surely have sensed the underlying motivation, he agreed.

As for me, I didn’t feel particularly sanguine about the chances our stay on Shikoku would result in a return to familial harmony, but I did understand that it would be less stressful for Chikashi not to have a couple of depressive lumps moping around the house, or the hospital. She had said all along that since I tended to be a worrywart, I should leave dealing with her illness to the female warriors in the family. I agreed to this hands-off approach, and the only medical information I had received was that a uterine tumor, benignly dormant for many years, had somehow become malignant and needed to be removed as soon as possible.

As things stood, I wasn’t being allowed to share in Akari’s music, which had long been both the most essential element in his life and his primary mode of communication within the family. Whenever my thoughts strayed to that torturous subject, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of utter desolation and spiritual bankruptcy. As we set off for Shikoku, Akari was in an understandably sour mood; after all, I had given him every reason to carry a major chip on his shoulder. He wasn’t speaking to me, and as far as I could see there was nothing I could do about that.

Our flight had been scheduled so that we would depart from Haneda Airport not long after Asa had flown in, so Maki was able to see Akari and me off while also meeting her arriving aunt. The exceedingly strained relations between me and both my children had made the taxi ride to the airport more than a little awkward, but naturally the ever-indomitable Asa had come equipped with a plan to drag me back into the land of the living.

“Kogii,” she said after we had exchanged cursory greetings, “I’ve arranged for someone to come by and keep you company at the Forest House from time to time. You’ll never guess who it is: Daio!” She then launched into a lengthy etymological explanation about the evolution of that person’s name and history, presumably for Maki and Akari’s benefit.

“So when he was repatriated to Japan as an unidentified orphan, the immigration officials gave him a made-up name: Ichiro Daio,” Asa concluded. “Our mother felt sorry for him, and because one of the medicinal herbs she used to gather — a type of wild rhubarb called daio—was known locally as gishi-gishi, she bestowed that playful nickname on him and it stuck. Of course, nobody calls him Gishi-Gishi anymore, and his first name somehow lost the long ‘o’ over the years. Kogii, I haven’t felt the time was right to tell you about Daio’s return, what with the whole drowning-novel debacle and all. When he first resurfaced, ages ago, Mother actually forbade me to share the news with you. But since you’ve now abandoned your novel for good, I don’t think I need to worry about Mother’s wishes anymore. Really, though, isn’t it like a nostalgic blast from the past to hear Daio’s name? I saw him at the memorial service on the tenth anniversary of Mother’s death, and when we started chatting I could tell he was thinking fondly about years gone by. He specifically mentioned that he was hoping to have a chance to see you again someday.”

Apart from this announcement, which she tossed off in a casual, matter-of-fact manner, Asa spent most of our shared time at the airport chatting with Akari. The unexpected mention of Daio reminded me that whenever my mother had addressed him as Gishi-Gishi — a nickname that could be translated, loosely, as “Mr. Rhubarb”—she always pronounced those words with an oddly singsong lilt, as if she were speaking Chinese. However, my attention at the airport and during the plane trip was entirely focused on my upcoming sojourn on Shikoku with Akari, so Asa’s news didn’t really register.

On the flight to Matsuyama, Akari seemed to be feeling some degree of pain or discomfort in his knees and lower back, but he didn’t complain. I sat next to him, alternately dozing and waking, and after a while I began to think my aging ears had somehow misheard what Asa had said. It hardly seemed likely that Daio (who had been dead for several years, as far as I knew) would be coming to visit me at the Forest House.

A day or so after I returned from my first guest-teaching stint in Berlin, I had received a large wooden crate along with a letter notifying me of Daio’s death, ostensibly sent by the few remaining disciples who were still living with him at his old paramilitary training camp. After offering the customary flowery greetings, the letter explained that with the demise of their leader the training camp was being disbanded and sold off piece by piece. It then went on to explain that the crate contained a gigantic freshwater turtle, which Daio had supposedly caught, just before his death, in a mountain stream at the lower end of the camp. The turtle was a remarkable specimen: a good fourteen centimeters tall and brimming with youthful strength and vigor. I interpreted the turtle’s sudden appearance as a personal challenge and, feeling rather like a jet-lagged gladiator, I immediately charged into battle. It took me from midnight until the break of dawn to subdue that formidable foe, and by the time I finally triumphed the kitchen was completely covered with blood and I was soaked in gore from head to foot.

Akari and I hailed a taxi outside Matsuyama Airport, then sat back in silence as the driver followed the road along the Kame River all the way to the Forest House. Upon our arrival we learned that Unaiko and Ricchan, having completed the preparations for our stay, had returned to Matsuyama, where the theater group had its offices. In their stead a young female member of the drama troupe, whom I had met briefly the last time I was at the Forest House, had prepared our evening meal and was waiting to greet us. Akari and I ate dinner without exchanging a word. After the girl from the Caveman Group had shown Akari around the premises — he had been there before, but it always took some time for him to get acclimated to any change of living situation — she gave us the keys to the house and took off. Akari climbed the stairs to the room she had pointed out as his, which was next to my combination study/bedroom.

I went into the great room on the ground floor, which was clearly in the process of being converted from a rehearsal area back into a living space. After opening my luggage and making a halfhearted stab at unpacking, I poured myself a little nightcap and drank it down. As I climbed the stairs, I couldn’t hear any sounds emanating from Akari’s room. Feeling an overwhelming sense of loneliness, I crawled into my bed, which smelled of sunlight. When I got up again a moment later to check whether the night-light in the bathroom was on, I saw that Akari’s pill organizer and a used drinking glass — clear evidence he hadn’t forgotten to take his bedtime medicine — had been left out in plain sight, where I would be sure to notice them.

The next morning I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. When I ran downstairs to answer it (Akari was evidently still asleep), an unmistakably familiar voice on the other end said, “Hello, this is Daio.” Despite Asa’s warning, I was startled. Daio must have picked up on my reaction, because he immediately launched into an apologetic explanation about the circumstances surrounding his spurious “death.”

When the training camp was breaking up, he told me, his mischievous disciples apparently decided that it would be amusing to play an elaborate prank on Kogito Choko, and the resulting jape was somehow connected with a “pre-death wake” they had staged in Daio’s honor before the members of the group went their separate ways.

“I’m already in the neighborhood, down by the river,” Daio went on. “I’ll wander around here for half an hour or so before heading to the Forest House. I’ve been there once before, when Asa invited me to a meeting of the drama group, so I know the way. She gave me a key as well.” “Thank you for calling,” I said. “If you had just appeared at the door with no advance notice, I might have thought I was seeing a ghost. On the other hand, my list of friends and acquaintances includes more and more dead people these days, so it might have seemed perfectly natural …”

“Asa said I should drop by as soon as possible after you arrived,” Daio said. “By the way, I gather you went through quite an ordeal with the turtle my disciples sent you as a joke. For quite some time now, reading has been my only pleasure; I read all your books as soon as they come out, so I know you wrote about that epic struggle in The Changeling. Speaking of turtles, there’s a much easier way to kill them, you know. You just put the creature on the cutting board, belly up, and when it sticks out its neck and starts thrashing around, trying to turn over, bam! You chop off its head, easy as pie. But hey — I guess even an erudite person like you has a few gaps in his knowledge!”

Half an hour later I came downstairs again and found Daio waiting in the great room. On the south side of the spacious room, between some professional lighting equipment and a pair of giant speakers, there were an oblong table and two chairs.

Daio was perched on one of those chairs, and I noticed that my opened trunk had been neatly placed on the floor of the makeshift stage in front of the large plate-glass window overlooking the back garden. I left the luggage strewn around the room when I went to bed, and Daio had apparently tidied it up without being asked. The sofa had been cleared off, too, evidently for Akari and me to use when we came downstairs. I couldn’t help thinking, This must be how it feels to have a butler, or a valet: a luxurious perk I had only read about in British novels.

Daio got up from his chair and gestured for me to take a seat on the couch. Then he shot a glance toward the stairs, clearly hoping to see Akari on his way down. I recalled that in the seemingly solemn letter his prankish training-camp disciples sent me they had used the term “one-legged and one-eyed” (which is often employed, both in period fiction and anime, to describe swordsmen with mythical powers) in reference to their leader. Just as I remembered, Daio was missing an arm, and one of his sleeves was neatly pinned up in the usual way.

“Hello, Kogito. It’s been a while,” he said, openly giving me the once-over. “I can’t help thinking that if your father had lived to enjoy his old age, he would have looked a lot like you do now — aside from your bad posture, of course. Your father always thought you would grow up to be an interesting chap, and you seem to have turned out just as he hoped.”

“Actually, I think the term he used was ‘joker,’ rather than ‘interesting chap,” I said lightly.

“No, but seriously, you really are an interesting guy,” Daio insisted. “And that isn’t the same as being a joker, or a jester, or whatever. As a child you were always searching for obscure characters in your father’s dictionary — you were kind of like an insect collector, only with kanji. I remember one time when your father was happily expounding on the meaning of some word or other and you interrupted, saying, ‘That’s not what it says in the dictionary!’ Then you added, a bit more kindly, that the print was extremely tiny and it was a rather complicated character, so your father had probably just misread it. And when he fished out his magnifying glass and examined the word in question, sure enough: you were right.”

It was actually a rather proud memory for me. At the time my father was only fifty years old, but because of a combination of wartime privations and the remoteness of our mountain village he was malnourished, and he probably had the eyesight of a much older man. As a result he would occasionally misread something, especially when the print was very small. I was obsessed with finding unusual kanji, so I used to spend hours poring over the index of my father’s big dictionary. That’s why I was able to suss out his mistakes on more than one occasion. I even made a point of memorizing potentially problematic characters, and whenever I came across one that I thought my father might be likely to misread at some point, I would be filled with youthful excitement.

Perhaps the most memorable example involved Shinobu Origuchi’s explanatory comments regarding his most famous novel, The Book of the Dead. Those remarks took the form of an essay titled “The Motif of the Mountain-Crossing Buddha,” which was published several years later. The passage in question was a description of how, in olden days, pilgrims used to flock to Shitennoji (the Temple of the Four Heavenly Kings) to watch the sun set over the western gate — a view popularly considered to be a preview of the heavenly paradise known as the Pure Land. Some of the most fervent believers would actually seek to take a shortcut to the Pure Land by drowning themselves in the Inland Sea or whatever body of water happened to be nearby.

When my father read this passage, he mistook 淼淼(a duplicated-kanji compound meaning “an endless expanse of water,” entirely composed of 水, the character for water) for a similar-looking compound: 森森, which consists of repetitions of 木, the character for “tree,” and is used to describe tall trees growing densely in a forest.

One day while my father was hard at work at our family business, inspecting the bundles of dried, bleached-out paperbush bark for any untidy scraps that might have adhered to them (he did this by turning the large bundles with a specially designed cargo hook), he started talking to my mother about the Origuchi book he had been reading. She was sitting next to him, busy with her own tasks.

“‘A dense forest of ocean waves’ is a rather intriguing turn of phrase,” he remarked. “Around here they say when someone passes away, that person’s spirit rises through the air and returns to the forest, isn’t that right? To the people who descend into the depths of the forest from the heights of the sky, the leaves of the trees might appear to resemble waves in the sea. So there really could be a thick forest of waves, figuratively speaking.”

My father was referring to the local belief that when people from our area die their souls return to the upper tier of the forest above the valley. In our family, the belief was fostered not by my father (who originally came from another part of the country) but by my grandmother and my mother, both of whom used to volunteer at the local shrine. My father tended to be quite taciturn and it was unusual for him to start a conversation in such a way, so it must have made my mother very happy.

I happened to be standing nearby, and their exchange made me prick up my ears. Because of my obsessive penchant for perusing the index of the kanji dictionary I was familiar with both of the characters in question, and when I ran to check the Origuchi book my hunch that my father had misread the compound was confirmed.

“The kanji in the quotation is written with the character for water, arranged in a sort of pyramid,” I announced triumphantly when I returned. “The one you mistook for it is constructed in the same way, only with the character for tree. The first one is used to talk about floods and so on, and also to describe a scene where a body of water stretches as far as the eye can see.”

My father put on the silver-framed reading glasses he always kept nearby and then, wearing an expression so serious that it almost made him look like a different person, he went into his small study in the interior of the house, presumably to double-check what I had said. Later, he apparently shared his pride and amusement over the incident with my mother and also, as I was learning just now, with Daio.

While I listened to Daio on that morning in early spring, an image floated across my mind: my father, not out on some vast ocean but rather spinning around on the river bottom during the big flood, on the verge of being inexorably drawn into the whirlpool. My father, who at that moment must have been experiencing the sensations of venturing deep into the forest and, simultaneously, being sucked into a watery vortex. My father, who (for all I knew) might even have believed in some paradisiacal world beyond — a realm that could somehow, magically, be reached by drowning.

“Choko Sensei was studying the ways in which society and the nation as a whole were moving forward,” Daio was saying. “He used to tell us about some of the things he learned from his correspondence with supposedly illustrious people, but when we asked whether those people were recognized experts in the field of politics or economics it always emerged that, in fact, they were not. But you yourself gravitated toward the study of literature, and we’ve all heard the story of how you became interested in the subject because of the books your mother brought home for you when you were a child, during the war.”

While Daio and I were enjoying a desultory chat, Unaiko (who had driven down from Matsuyama) was busy in the kitchen fixing breakfast for us. When she came into the great room bearing coffee, she was dressed more or less as usual in Chinese-style trousers and a loose shirt that was almost like a jacket. However, I also got a clear sense of something Asa had spoken of in one of her letters: Unaiko did, indeed, project a kind of heightened aura, as if the major success of her theater-in-the-round play had somehow peeled away part of a protective carapace while also giving her self-confidence a visible boost.

Unaiko needed to consult with me about some practical matters, such as what time Akari should be awakened and when was the latest he could take his morning medicine — Maki had provided a list of all the meds and their dosages — but she conducted even that quotidian exchange in a lively, energized way. Evidently she had already had some preliminary discussions about division of labor with Daio.

“I’ll go upstairs and get Akari out of bed myself,” I said. “I don’t foresee any particular problems during the morning hours, at least.”

At this point Unaiko produced a fax from Maki that gave detailed instructions about Akari’s breakfast menus, complete with illustrations in the margins, and began to study it carefully.

The night before I had checked to make sure Akari was asleep and breathing normally before going to bed myself, but I hadn’t waited until he made his nightly midsleep trip to the bathroom. Before my disastrous outburst in the clinic’s waiting room, I had made a ritual of getting up whenever I heard Akari making his way to the toilet; I would go into his room and tidy the sheets and quilts, then wait for him to return so I could tuck him in again. Since that dark day, though, I hadn’t once performed my familiar middle-of-the-night task — which I had always thought of as something I would be doing forever.

Now, as I opened the door and entered the room (which was still dark because of the drawn curtains, and redolent of Akari’s body odor), I felt reluctant to turn on the light. After a moment I got a sense that something was stirring in the bed and then, finally, I flipped the switch. Akari was lying stretched out on the bed, wrapped in a cotton quilt and staring at the ceiling.

“You and I are going to be staying here at the Forest House for a little while,” I said, by way of orientation. “Mama and Maki aren’t here, so can you get dressed by yourself? A friend of Auntie Asa’s named Unaiko is making breakfast for us. If you’ve already used the toilet, let’s go downstairs. You can brush your teeth in the guest washroom there, all right?”

“I understand,” came the uninflected reply.

As Akari began to climb out of bed, I noticed that his movements were slower and clumsier than usual, and there seemed to be a hitch in his basic locomotion. I started to offer to help him to his feet, but then I lost my nerve. Instead, I walked over to the window next to the bed and pulled open the drapes. The trees hadn’t yet begun to bud, and the front garden looked barren and deserted. The river shoreline beyond the wooded valley was shrouded in clouds, and the slope above it had a bleak, desolate aspect. I was standing with my back to Akari, but I got the feeling that he was dressing himself with unusual alacrity.

My son and I descended the staircase in single file, keeping several steps between us. Unaiko was waiting at the bottom, and she led Akari to the washroom. When he didn’t take any notice of the visitor in the great room, Daio withheld his own greeting as well, but I could see him studying the hesitation in Akari’s gait.

While I was upstairs Daio had apparently been looking at a monochromatic woodblock print on the wall next to the sofa in the great room, which was the only decoration.

“What’s the story behind this piece of art?” he asked. “This dog looks really ferocious, as if with the proper training it could be taught to kill people.”

“Ah, you’re wondering about the print?” I said. “Well, I originally brought it down on my previous trip with the intention of hanging it in the space where I thought I would be working on a novel about my father, before and after his death. (That project is now defunct, as you may have heard.) When I went back to Tokyo I simply forgot to take it with me.”

“Maybe leaving it behind was just another symbol of your decision to give up on your drowning novel,” Daio said. “Asa was saying that it almost seemed as if the project was doomed from the start.”

Unaiko had returned from escorting Akari to the downstairs restroom and now she, too, was gazing at the woodblock print on the wall. “Maybe I’m being obtuse,” she said, “but I don’t see any great significance in your having forgotten to take this picture back to Tokyo. On the other hand, it’s certainly true that you did make a special point of grabbing this one particular work of art and lugging it all the way down here.”

I responded with an account of the print’s provenance. “I really don’t think this dog has the sort of evil mojo Daio seems to be ascribing to it,” I said. “On the other hand, I won’t pretend it’s a tranquil and pastoral image, either. As you can see, the date is written in pencil under the author’s signature. This piece was created in 1945, the year my father died, by a printmaker in Mexico, but I didn’t acquire it until the seventies. It’s actually a rather interesting story. At the time, just after the war, the government was oppressing some newspaper companies in Mexico City, and the reporters for those papers staged a major strike. They solicited support from every sphere of culture and the arts, and the printmakers helped raise money by selling work from their private collections. From what I heard, this print was one of them. I bought it at a gallery several decades later, when I was teaching in Mexico City.

“For those reporters, having their freedom of expression thwarted was exactly the same as if their newspapers had been physically trampled into the ground, and this print could be interpreted as a symbolic depiction of the dilemma they faced. In the foreground, the angrylooking dog that’s facing in our direction, just beginning to bark, is shown in extreme close-up. But is the dog meant to symbolize the newspaper reporters who were resisting the government’s interference, or does it represent the oppressive wielders of authority? I talked about this with some of the cultural movers and shakers who took me to the exhibition where I bought this print, and their opinions were divided between those two interpretations. But the truth is, I just bought this piece, in all innocence, because I liked it. At the end of my term at El Colegio de México (the national graduate school), I received a half year’s pay as a single lump-sum payment, and I used it to buy the print. It’s signed by the artist: Siqueiros.”

“Oh, you mean the Siqueiros?” Unaiko asked. She looked genuinely surprised and impressed. “I had no idea. I’ve seen photos of his big public murals in art books. The funny thing is, I’ve been thinking all along that whoever created this little print must be quite an exceptional artist. Asa was even saying the other day that we should try to make some stuffed dogs with this same kind of visual impact!”

“That reminds me, when you were in tech for your dog-tossing play at the theater in the round, Asa mentioned something about wanting to hang this in the auditorium lobby,” I said.

“Yes, she was saying that the only complaint she had about the production was that there were some people in the audience who thought the stuffed dogs were cute,” Unaiko said, wrinkling her nose. “She wanted to hang this fierce picture in the lobby to dispel that impression. Next time we do a show, would you please let us borrow it? And, if you didn’t mind, it would be great if we could photograph this print and put the image on T-shirts for our entire crew to wear, like a uniform.”

“Please put me on the list for one of those shirts, too!” Daio said brightly. I had noticed earlier that he was rather stylishly dressed (especially for someone his age) in a beige corduroy jacket worn over a shirt of heavy brown cotton, and it occurred to me that his fashion sense appeared to have evolved considerably during the years since I’d seen him last.

We all trooped into the dining room, where Unaiko had laid out a meal of eggs, toast, and coffee. Daio had eaten breakfast before he came, so he only wanted coffee. Holding his cup, he stood behind Akari’s chair. “Akari, your back’s hurting, isn’t it?” he asked. “Especially here at the very base, on this side?”

“Yes, it hurts a lot,” Akari replied in a voice unusually full of emotion. “It’s been hurting all the time, for a while now.”

“Please just go on eating,” Daio said. “I’m going to try touching your back in a few places but it won’t hurt, I promise.”

As he spoke those reassuring words Daio knelt next to Akari’s chair and began to apply light pressure in the vicinity of Akari’s lower back, using his right hand. (Since he didn’t have a left arm, Daio had to lean his upper body against the back of the chair for leverage.)

“How about here, Akari? It probably felt sore when you were lying in bed, am I right?”

“Yes, very sore,” Akari said.

“I’m not actually going to touch this spot, but I want to ask you about the bottom of your spine — your backbone,” Daio said. “Did you by any chance fall and land on your backside?”

“Once when I was having a seizure I fell down in the entryway at home,” Akari replied. “It started feeling bad after that.”

“Akari, I know your back hurts, so I haven’t been touching the area around that bone. But now Uncle Daio is going to touch the sore place, just for a second. All right?” As Daio continued poking around, Akari’s torso, which was rigid with tension, gave an involuntary start.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Daio said. “You’re a very stoic person, aren’t you, Akari? I mean, you’re very patient and brave. You have had some discomfort when you were in bed at night, but you never mentioned it to anyone?”

“No, I didn’t tell anybody,” Akari replied, looking up at Daio.

Daio turned to me. “Kogito, after my training camp closed, one of my former disciples got some medical training and then came back and opened an osteopathy office in Honmachi. Some years later, the man’s son-in-law went to a university med school, and when he returned after graduation he converted the osteopathy offices into a regular medical clinic. We ought to take Akari there and get some X-rays, for starters. I think we’ll find that one side of the lowest thoracic vertebra in his spinal column has somehow gotten crushed. I have to say it again: Akari is being exceptionally patient and brave about this.”

Akari had gone back to staring down at his plate, but it was apparent that he had already come to trust the much older man (slightly built but with perfectly erect, military-style posture) who was kneeling beside his chair. Daio appeared extremely flushed: his entire face was suffused with blood, from his shriveled, walnut-colored cheeks all the way to the base of his neck, evidently from pride about his amateur diagnosis.

Perhaps because I didn’t immediately concur with Daio’s suggestion, Unaiko shot me a critical look, then said, “The X-rays should probably be done as soon as possible. Ricchan is using our car this morning, so could you please take Akari to the clinic you mentioned in your car, Daio? I’ll ride along, if that’s okay.”

2

After their visit to the local clinic, Akari and Daio returned to the Forest House. The X-rays had confirmed Daio’s intuitive diagnosis: Akari’s lowermost thoracic vertebra had been crushed and he had muscular damage in his back as well. When I called to tell Asa, she gave me the name of a specialist at the Red Cross Hospital in Matsuyama who would be able to make a plaster cast. (At the time I was still feeling flustered by this new development and I mistakenly said that it was the thirteenth vertebra, but Asa was quick to inform me that the human anatomy contains no such bone.)

After lunch Akari and Daio headed out again, this time to Matsuyama. I saw them off (noting again that my son had placed his entire trust in the older man), then went upstairs and lay motionless on my bed, unable to summon enough energy even to read a book. I couldn’t stop thinking about Akari’s back trouble, which was unlike anything we’d dealt with before. I had felt uneasy about his evident discomfort while we were seated on the airplane, but why hadn’t I followed up right away? I thought, too, about the state of mind that had caused Akari to choose suffering in silence over sharing his pain with his father.

I heard the sound of someone loitering at the bottom of the stairs, and when I went down to check I found Unaiko standing in the entry hall.

“Ricchan’s back, and when I told her I was concerned about how dejected you seemed to be, she reminded me that Asa had told us about a place out in the boonies called the Saya,” she said. “We’ve been meaning to go there for some recon, since the location will have some bearing on our next public performance, and she suggested you might be willing to give us a guided tour.”

I returned to my room to change into the proper gear for traipsing through a forest, and when I went downstairs again I found Unaiko waiting for me in the elevated driver’s seat of the Caveman Group’s van, looking fresh and crisp after her own change of clothes. I climbed into the passenger seat.

“Even though Ricchan and I haven’t talked to Akari very much so far, he’s been very good about doing whatever we ask,” she said. “But he seems so sad and disheartened, and he doesn’t appear to do anything on his own initiative. Is that just the way he is these days? Asa told us that Akari always used to listen to music and study scores, while also working on his own compositions, so I guess we were expecting something different.”

I knew I would eventually have to explain what had transpired between Akari and me, but that prospect made me feel even gloomier than before. I suspected Unaiko wasn’t the type of person who would wait patiently for me to share the full story on my own timetable, but as it turned out she had already heard most of the details from my sister.

“I hope you don’t mind, but Asa told me pretty much everything she heard from Chikashi,” Unaiko said. “She mentioned that nowadays when you and Akari are together in the same place, he doesn’t listen to music at all. Apparently after the Big Vertigo struck you didn’t go out, aside from visits to the hospital for tests and so on, and you just puttered around the house day and night. As a result, there was never a time when Akari could relax by himself and enjoy listening to music, especially since the doctor had advised against prolonged use of headphones. I don’t know whether you expressly forbade Akari to listen to music, but apparently that was the impression he got.”

“Yes, Chikashi said I was probably sending that message unconsciously. There was just a little misunderstanding about the volume on the CD player,” I said, radically understating the problem.

“Well, it seems as if Akari has been feeling as though he did something bad and made you angry, and he hasn’t been able to forgive himself.”

“No, as I understand it, he simply decided not to share music with his father anymore, in any form.”

“Akari has a lot of pride, doesn’t he?” Unaiko asked.

“When families have offspring with cognitive disabilities, it’s very common to go on treating them like children long after they’ve reached maturity, and that has certainly been true in my own household at times,” I admitted. “Akari is a full-fledged adult now — he’s forty-five years old — but you’re definitely right about my son’s having an inordinate amount of pride.”

“Well, here’s an idea,” Unaiko offered. “You might not even be willing to consider something like this but I wanted to ask, at least. Actually, it’s about the van. In order to get the best use out of it, we converted it into a sort of studio on wheels. It’s furnished with high-end recording equipment, and we’ve already used it to record some radio dramas.

“So I was thinking that from time to time either Ricchan or I could take Akari out for a drive, maybe up into the mountains. We could park the van somewhere and then we could stay in the front seat doing paperwork or whatever while he would be in the back, listening to music with complete freedom. Does that sound like a workable plan?”

“If you’re able to persuade Akari to go for a drive, more power to you,” I said. “I would have no objections at all.”

“Well, as you know, Akari didn’t hesitate to go up to Matsuyama today with Daio at the wheel,” Unaiko pointed out. She sounded relieved. “That’s what made us think the system I just outlined might work. So I’ll wait for an opportune moment, and then I’ll try inviting Akari for a musical drive.”

We continued heading east on the national highway that runs along the Kame River, and then we took a secondary road through the bamboo grove where the farmers who took part in the famous insurrection cut bamboo stalks to make into spears. We emerged from the grove onto a smooth, well-maintained byway that led to a number of hamlets, then forked again. This time we headed north, following a serpentine lane into the wooded slope above the valley. Finally a meadow shaped like the sheath of a sword — the area’s local nickname, “Saya,” carries that meaning, among others — came into sight. At that point the road narrowed considerably, becoming no wider than a walking trail through the forest, so the only way to get to the Saya was on foot.

We left the van in a clearing and I led the way, since I had been there many times in the past. Scrambling down the slope, Unaiko and I entered a grove of broadleaf trees with dark, lush foliage and then climbed back up, following a slender path to a clearing drenched in sunlight. This was the lower end of the Saya. We were standing in a long, grassy, open space that had been carved out of the forest by a renegade meteor, with a little follow-up assistance from local residents. (It was perfectly suited for flower-viewing parties during cherry blossom season, but as yet there was no sign the buds had begun to swell.) We gazed at the gentle slope stretching above us to the north.

“Do you see the black rock just above the midway point?” I asked. “It’s part of a meteor that fell to earth, creating a clearing and this scabbard-shaped depression. I think what actually happened is that the meteor landed right in the middle of the virgin forest and the area below it, the Saya, was collateral damage — or should I say collateral construction? In feudal times, the young samurai supposedly turned this place into a makeshift racetrack or riding course, and used it to train for the tumultuous period of internecine strife that began during the last days of the Tokugawa Era. That’s another tidbit of the rich lore about this place.”

“I’ve heard that they leveled the flat area beyond the big black rock and then moved the timberline so it would seem to begin naturally right above there,” Unaiko said. “Asa told me about the time she and her colleagues put on a play here, as part of the film project; apparently they turned the whole lower part into audience seating, with as many as five hundred local women crowded in, going crazy over what was happening onstage — and then the scene was filmed. Asa was saying it was a once-in-a-lifetime event, bringing those local people together to participate in something so glorious and so inspiring.”

“Yes,” I said. “Asa was responsible for the cinematography aspect of the film, and her part of the project went perfectly. The problems began after primary shooting had wrapped. When the film reached the final editing stage, both in Japan and America, the NHK faction of the production team raised some objections, claiming the subject matter of the film had deviated from what was agreed upon in the contract. Meanwhile, on the American side, the woman who had been pouring her own money into the project — an internationally known actress and family friend whom Asa had managed to turn into an enthusiastic participant — anyway, she took the opposite position and refused to budge. As a result of the impasse, the production ground to a halt and everyone involved found themselves in limbo. The project ultimately ended up going broke, and it wasn’t clear who owned the rights. Asa ran around trying to create a nonprofit organization down here to keep the project alive, and that was how she started networking with the local theater community, including you and your colleagues at the Caveman Group. So for Asa, at least, I guess that abortive enterprise wasn’t completely meaningless.”

“But didn’t the movie win a prize at some Czech and Canadian film festivals, even though it never went wide?” Unaiko inquired. “Asa mentioned something about a whole slew of difficulties, but she was reluctant to go into detail because several issues are still being contested in court. What I’m getting at is that Ricchan and I have been thinking about what to do for our next big drama project, and we’ve become very interested in the movie and the local history it was based on. However, we haven’t even been able to get our hands on a copy of the screenplay because everything related to the film is tied up in litigation. And since the project was an international collaboration, trying to make sense of the contract is a huge hassle. Asa told us she gave her only copy of the script to the attorney, and he still has it today. We’ve been wanting to talk to you about this for ages, Mr. Choko, but Asa kept telling us to bide our time and wait for the right moment.”

I had been sent a final version of the screenplay, with certain portions translated into English alongside the Japanese, but I kept that information to myself. Unaiko didn’t pursue the matter any further; she just stood there with her perfect posture, gazing up at the trees. But her face wore an expression of renewed determination, and as I looked at her slim profile I felt certain I hadn’t heard the last about her desire to get her hands on a copy of the script.

3

Ever since the Caveman Group had turned the Forest House into a rural outpost of its headquarters in Matsuyama, one large room on the west end of the ground floor was used by Unaiko and Ricchan as a combination studio and sleeping space. After Akari and I moved in the two women had continued to work and sleep in that room, but their style seemed to be somewhat cramped by our presence. Perhaps that was why they sometimes drove over to Asa’s empty house by the river and spent the night there.

When the troupe members were in rehearsal mode, whether they were running lines or choosing musical cues, I could sense that everyone was being careful not to let any extraneous sounds drift upstairs where they might disturb Akari and me. Sometimes I would even hear the voices of the young actors wafting in on the breeze from the forest road above the house, where they apparently felt they could practice their art with fewer inhibitions.

Daio turned up every other day or so, and it soon became clear that he had taken it upon himself to do most of the yard work and whatever else might be needed in the way of general maintenance. On the evenings when I fixed dinner myself, he would run me down to the supermarket in Honmachi in his vintage Mercedes-Benz sedan to buy the necessary groceries. If I happened to be downstairs in the great room while Akari was out on a music-appreciation outing, Daio would often engage me in conversation, although I could sense he was trying to keep our exchanges relatively short out of consideration for me. Before long, I began paying Daio the going rate for hourly labor around those parts. (Admittedly, it hadn’t occurred to me to do so until Asa made the suggestion in one of her responses to the informal “Forest House reports” Unaiko emailed to her every week.)

Starting with the first trip to Matsuyama, when Daio took Akari to get fitted for a plaster cast, the number of tasks I was able to delegate to Daio seemed to be increasing on a daily basis, which was a great weight off my mind. He even took on the duty of bringing us our own mail from the post office, along with any packages the postman left at Asa’s unoccupied house.

From what I gathered, one of Unaiko’s weekly reports to Asa mentioned her concerns about the fact that I didn’t appear to be living a very dynamic life at the Forest House, to put it mildly. Not long afterward, I received a worried-sounding fax from Asa. Unaiko had apparently written that while she knew I was taking a break from writing after the disastrous demise of the drowning novel, I didn’t even seem to be reading with my usual concentration (at least not when I was downstairs, where she could observe my behavior). Unaiko added that I was evidently in extremely low spirits and basically seemed to be sitting around in a daze, passively watching the hours slip by. In her fax, Asa asked whether the doctor had told me to cut back on my reading in the aftermath of the Big Vertigo. Or, she speculated, maybe I was trying to keep my intellectual endeavors to a minimum, in the hopes of reducing the frequency of those chronic dizzy spells.

I wrote back that shortly before Akari and I moved down here I had pulled a number of books I might want to read off some bookshelves in our house in Tokyo and had left them on the floor, but I hadn’t had time to pack them up and send them to Shikoku. Asa responded by promising that the next time she was able to get away from the hospital she would go to our house in Seijo and complete the task. After a few days, three large cardboard boxes full of books were delivered to the door by courier.

As twofold evidence of my somber, senescent state of mind, not only did I procrastinate unpacking the cartons Asa had sent, but I also overlooked the fact that there was a smaller box from a different sender sitting on top of them. I noticed the extra one only when I finally got around to tackling the stack a day or two later; its brown-paper wrappings so closely resembled those of the others that it had simply blended in. The small, sturdy box had been carefully packed, and the return address was the Caveman Group’s office in Matsuyama.

When I opened the box I found a masterfully crafted picture frame wrapped in brown paper, along with a taped-on card signed by all the members of the Caveman Group. The card read simply, For Mr. Choko: We’re glad you came back to the forest! When I tore away the wrapping I saw a full-length photograph of a voluptuous young woman standing, completely naked, in front of a painted backdrop depicting a large city at night. After I had spent several minutes gazing at the portrait, I suddenly recognized the woman’s resolute, triumphant-looking profile. It was, unmistakably, Unaiko!

In order to get the shot, I mused, the photographer must have been directly in front of the stage, with an assistant crouching down on one side and aiming a handheld light to illuminate the subject at the proper angle. The woman in the photograph was wearing black high heels and she looked as if she might be getting ready to step off the edge of the stage, with the bulk of her weight supported on the left side of her body. Although the muscles were overlaid with a layer of soft fat, the firm solidity of her thighs was clearly apparent, as was the luxuriant thicket of hair covering her gently rounded pubic area. As for her breasts, they were so perfect that they reminded me of the impossibly idealized portrayals of the female form in comic books and graphic novels. Evidently the senders wanted me to feast my eyes on this photograph and I was doing just that, so I was startled when I heard Unaiko’s voice behind me, from the stairs.

“Before the photograph was sent to you, my colleagues in the Caveman Group hung it on the wall of our headquarters for a day,” she said. “It seemed to be common knowledge that you have what they called a ‘pubic-hair fetish,’ so I guess they thought it would be a witty gift. Anyway, this photograph was taken five years ago during a public performance, without my knowledge. I don’t think the motivation behind their sending it to you now was anything more sinister than a desire to tease Old Man Choko a little bit, but I wouldn’t want you to think of me as belonging to a group that would joke around about someone’s, um, private predilections. Backstory aside, though, I gather you’ve taken a liking to the picture?”

“Yes, I like it very much,” I said. After a moment I added, “Since this was a gift to me, I think I’d better keep it in my study, just to be safe.” Akari had been a step or two behind Unaiko when she came down from the second floor, and he had passed by on his way to the restroom. I was hoping he hadn’t seen the framed photograph I was holding, since it was the kind of thing he always found upsetting, but when he stormed into the washroom, slamming the door behind him, I knew he must have caught a glimpse of the photo and formed an impression of the subject matter, if not the subject.

Even before we had fallen into the current deplorable state of affairs, it had been clear that Akari felt particularly ill at ease whenever I was conversing with visitors on topics with the slightest hint of a sexual connotation, even though he probably didn’t understand what was being discussed with any degree of clarity. Unaiko had evidently intuited the reason behind Akari’s door-slamming discomfiture, because she redirected our playful conversation about the photograph into a more serious channel.

“From this angle I appear to be standing on the stage stark-naked, like a fool, but there’s actually a military formation downstage from me, waving an assortment of flags,” she explained. “The naked woman is meant to be confronting that group, although there’s some doubt as to whether it poses any actual threat, and she is seen by the audience for only a split second before the stage is plunged into total darkness. Masao is a big proponent of deliberate ambiguity in his theater work, so while the naked woman was supposed to be standing there openly and proudly, the original plan was for her torso to be covered by a nude-colored tank top that came down to the tops of her thighs. I was actually the one who insisted full-frontal nudity was the only honest way to go. The next day we gave my ‘little striptease’ (as Masao insisted on calling it) a trial run at the first performance, to see how it would play onstage, and someone who was there returned the next night and took a surreptitious photo, and then sold it to a photography magazine. That photo created quite a sensation, and it’s one of the reasons the Caveman Group got a reputation for doing outrageous things, even before we started throwing ‘dead dogs’ around. Masao was so incensed that he threatened legal action, but the other party had proof the photo had been taken legitimately at a public performance, so that was the end of it.

“Getting back to the gift, I can’t help speculating about the motivation. I know that certain members of our troupe decided to send you this photo on the pretext of indulging your supposed pubic-hair fetish, but I can’t help wondering whether they might also have had a hidden agenda. I think this bizarre gesture might have been rooted in their apprehensions about our next big public-performance project — you know, the one Ricchan and I have been trying to put together, with Asa’s help. I know there’s a faction in the Caveman Group that isn’t completely thrilled with what I’ve been doing, and these members also voiced concern that my projects could end up overshadowing their own work. As I’m sure you’re aware, even in a theater group that appears to be made up of forward-looking artists there can still be a strong undertone of sexist discrimination directed toward ‘uppity females,’ especially in the more rural parts of this country.”

4

Later that morning, toward the end of the breakfast hour, Daio stopped by to relay an important message: Akari’s custom-made plaster cast had been delivered to the clinic in Honmachi.

“The cast is removable, so it will need to be taken off every night at bedtime and put back on first thing in the morning. Once you get the hang of it, Akari, you should be able to handle both those tasks by yourself,” Daio explained. “During the early stages, though, would you be able to take on that responsibility, Kogito? If so, I’d like to take you and Akari down to the clinic to get some pointers about how to deal with the cast.”

“I’ve been getting Akari’s bed ready every evening for the past forty-some years, except when I’ve been away from home, so I don’t think dealing with a cast will be excessively challenging,” I said drily.

“I’m making my bed all by myself now,” Akari muttered, looking down at his plate.

“Yesterday evening I was sticking special tape on the most painful places for you, isn’t that right, Akari?” I said. “I was being very careful not to touch your crushed vertebra, but …”

“It never hurt when Unaiko and Ricchan did it, either,” Akari retorted.

“Then would you rather have those two help you with the cast during the early stages, while you’re getting used to it?” I asked, unable to keep the despondency out of my voice. “If they have time, of course.”

“We were planning to ride along to the clinic in any case — that is, either Ricchan or me,” Unaiko said. “Since all we’re doing right now is outlining our next big production, we would be happy to help Akari in any way we can. Akari, would you like me to drive you today?”

“That sounds great!” Akari exclaimed.

“Thanks, Unaiko. I’ll leave it to you then,” Daio said. He, too, kept his face averted so he wouldn’t have to meet my eyes.

After Akari and Unaiko had set off in the van I went back to work unpacking the rest of the books Asa had sent. Daio sat on the sofa, reaching out from time to time to pick up a book and leaf idly through it. After a moment, I began to reminisce aloud.

“As you mentioned the other day, when Goro and I were still in high school, during the Occupation, we paid a visit to your training camp and we brought along an American officer who was a language expert,” I said. “His name was Peter, and your students hatched a plan to use him as a conduit to get their hands on some automatic pistols, rifles, and so on that the Americans had scrapped after the Korean War. Goro and I somehow got dragged into it, and we ended up overreacting just a bit.”

“Yes, I remember,” Daio said, and chuckled. “You put all the lurid details into one of your recent novels. Someone told me about the book, and when I read it I thought, Ah, so this is what was going on in Kogito’s head that weekend.

“As you say, Peter sold us some old army-surplus guns, which we thought we could turn around and sell to a scrap-iron dealer to raise a few bucks. However, when you wrote about that transaction in your novel, you added an imaginary scene in which Peter’s own pistol is forcibly confiscated by the guys from my training camp. You left it ambiguous, as you tend to do, but the implication was that Peter might have met with foul play at the hands of my followers. One of the local policemen happened to read the book and he came snooping around the camp, asking questions. This was a long time ago, of course. The truth was, we had kept a few of the surplus guns to use for target practice and that kind of thing, but everything was perfectly innocent and above board, and no harm came to Peter at all.”

“Yes, I realize that now,” I said. “But at the time, based on what Goro and I saw and heard at the training camp that weekend, we seriously believed you and your disciples were planning to attack the American military base on the outskirts of Matsuyama the night the peace treaty went into effect: September 8, 1951. When the date rolled around we were glued to the radio till well past midnight, expecting to hear some breaking news about your exploits.”

“Oh, right.” Daio smiled sheepishly. “You mentioned in your book that you even took a photo to commemorate the occasion. It seems as though we inadvertently set you boys up for a big disappointment, and I’m sorry about that,” he added, but he didn’t sound very contrite.

“Of course, we knew those discarded guns wouldn’t be of any use in actual combat,” I said. “After all, they were old and rusty and obsolete. We figured you were just using them as props for playing war games, but we really did believe your group was planning to stage some kind of suicidal attack on the American MPs who were guarding the gate of the army base. If you and your subordinates had actually followed through on that plan you would have been shot dead in the blink of an eye — although it would have gone down in history as the only uprising ever staged during the tenure of the occupying forces.”

“Well, the guerrilla warfare didn’t take place, and to be candid there was really never any chance it was going to,” Daio said. “The truth is, we did have one serious goal, although it was probably more of a wild hope. Since you obviously believed our goal was to get ourselves killed and go out in a blaze of glory, we thought you might be moved to drop by the training camp again on the day in question to try to intervene. If you had, I was hoping we would be able to persuade you — as the son and heir of Choko Sensei — to become our leader going forward.

“Going back a few years to when Japan lost the war, the most upsetting thing was that all the army officers and sailors who had seemed to be so gung ho about our earlier plan suddenly began acting as if they had just been released from an evil spell or something,” Daio went on. “They started acting as though everything we had talked about was a big joke and pretending they had never been serious about it at all. Choko Sensei was the only one who was fully committed to our ideologies, to the point where he felt compelled to flee the village, but of course he was swept away by the flooded river and ended up drowning before he could make his escape. Your father cared enough about our beliefs to stake his life on them, so we, as his survivors, were trying to preserve those principles through our work at the training camp after the war was over. Even today, I can’t help thinking about how inspiring it would have been if we could have had Choko Sensei’s son as our leader, to look up to. But yes, it’s true that even though we did have some abstract discussions about staging a kamikaze attack as a sort of posthumous tribute to your father’s devotion to the cause, when that day arrived my young disciples and I sat around laughing about that over-the-top scenario, and everyone agreed it had been a ridiculously unrealistic idea all along.

“Then many years later, when I read your novel, I was surprised to discover how seriously you and Goro had taken the whole thing. I mean, you two were so worried about the possibility of getting into trouble for your part in the illegal gun exchange that you actually went so far as to take a commemorative photo in case you ended up going to jail.”

Daio paused for a moment before adding, with a wry smile, “It’s really kind of funny, when you think about it!”

Chapter 9. Late Work

1

Several days later I plunked myself down on the great-room sofa, which had been jammed into a corner to create more space for rehearsals, and continued unpacking the books Asa had sent down from Tokyo. (I had already devoted three full days to this task.) I spent a few moments leafing through each volume before moving on to the next. When I had finished perusing one stack I put that batch back into its cardboard box, extracted a new pile of books, and began the process anew.

Normally I would have been prospecting for some riveting research topic to throw myself into as the first step toward beginning a new novel, but that wasn’t the case now. These were mostly books I had stashed on the top shelf of a certain bookcase at my house in Tokyo with the idea of eventually getting around to rereading them. In my upstairs study/bedroom there I kept my indispensable collection — many years in the making — of books by an assortment of authors, poets, and thinkers (including the collected works of my mentor, Professor Musumi) and a number of those were in the boxes as well. Finally, there were numerous unexplored volumes that I’d been planning to read someday at my leisure. Since I had abandoned the drowning novel and didn’t have a clue what else I might tackle as part of a late-work plan, the inchoate someday was suddenly at hand.

In the past whenever I had decided to seize the moment and begin rereading a certain book, before long I would toss it aside and move on to the next volume on the shelf. You might think such a scattershot approach would be an unsatisfying way to pass the time, but it wasn’t uncommon for me to look up from the pages and discover that two or three hours had passed in a pleasant blur. This was similar to the process I always went through when I was casting around for subject matter for my next book, but I already knew I wouldn’t be tackling another novel-length fiction project any time soon, if ever. At least, I thought, I could use this fallow time to catch up on my reading — and my rereading as well.

On this day, Unaiko and Akari had driven away in the Caveman Group’s van for an outing that would combine listening to music with exercise. (Those jaunts were now an almost daily occurrence.)

Not long after they set off, I received a phone call from Unaiko. There was a good deal of background noise and I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying, but she was clearly upset. When I realized that she was trying to tell me something about Akari, I jumped up from the sofa in alarm. The crackling static on the line kept getting louder and louder, and then the phone abruptly went dead. I replaced the handset in its cradle, then stood anxiously next to the phone and waited. Ten endless minutes later, it finally rang again. This time Asa was on the other end, calling from Tokyo. She sounded perfectly calm — almost too calm, as if she was making a conscious effort to convey that impression.

“Akari had a seizure,” she said. “He and Unaiko were up at the Saya, doing one of their fitness walks, and apparently it happened when they stopped to rest. Unaiko called me in a state of panic, saying she had tried to reach you but it was a bad connection to start with, and then the call was dropped. Luckily she was able to get through to Tamakichi’s mobile phone, and he called me in Tokyo. As it happened he’s already in the neighborhood, doing some forestry work not far from your house — planting saplings and whatnot. Anyhow, you need to head over to the Saya as soon as possible, so Tamakichi will swing by shortly to get you. He said it would help if you could be waiting for him at the top of the driveway.”

As I rushed around getting ready to leave, I couldn’t stop worrying about Akari’s seizure. There was a chance he might have fallen and hit his head on one of the rocks scattered around the Saya, I thought. For some reason that image reminded me of the strength and resiliency of Unaiko’s thighs the day we first met on the cycling path near my house in Tokyo, when she caught me from behind and saved me from toppling over.

In any event, I managed to find Akari’s prepacked emergency bag (which I had forgotten to give to Unaiko to take along on their outing), and as I emerged from the house my nephew Tamakichi was already sitting in the driveway in a pickup truck. Without getting out of the cab, he stretched one suntanned arm across the passenger seat and opened the door for me. No sooner had I climbed in than he put his foot on the gas pedal and sped away.

“I’m sorry you had to drive all the way down here,” I said. “I know I was supposed to be waiting for you up by the forest road, but when you start getting older everything seems to move in slow motion.”

“No worries,” Tamakichi replied. “I called Unaiko back, and she said that Akari was already up and about. I gathered they were just heading to the river to get him cleaned up.”

This news came as a great relief, but then I noticed that instead of taking the forest road through the valley, Tamakichi was heading uphill. “Is this the right way?” I asked.

“If you take the forest road to the Saya, you have to park the car and walk quite a ways,” Tamakichi explained. “I’m planning to take a detour, so we’ll be approaching from the top.”

I was forced to admit (although only to myself) that there were some gaps in my knowledge of the local topography these days. “Your mother was saying that when she was making her movie, your knowledge of the entire forest area made location scouting and filming much easier,” I said. “I gather you’re serious about making a career of forestry work?”

Tamakichi nodded. “I am,” he said. “You had the same inclination when you were a child, didn’t you, Uncle Kogito? You mentioned it in a couple of your books. Anyhow, long before we started working on the movie, the local village board had been doing a lot of maintenance work on the Saya and the surrounding area. Then when filming began there was a ‘no men allowed’ rule in effect, so my male colleagues and I were relegated to doing cleanup and postproduction work. I’ve never even seen the finished movie.”

“Didn’t you at least get to watch the daily rushes on video, to see how your carefully tended forest came across on film?”

“No, not really,” Tamakichi replied. “We asked the NHK office in Matsuyama whether that would be possible, and when nothing came of our request we tried contacting the main office of the American production company. They said we would need to submit a request in English, and at that point we just gave up. However, it was really something to have so many local women gathered in one place, and it turned into a kind of giant party or festival. Everyone agreed that the Gathering, as it came to be known, was the biggest women-only event since the famous insurrection. Now whenever people get together at the Saya to celebrate the fall colors or the cherry blossoms someone will always yell, ‘Hurray for the Gathering!’ and that’s the signal for everyone to take a drink.”

“‘The Gathering,’ eh? I’ll drink to that!” I said with feeling.

The forest road we were traveling on passed through a rather sparsely wooded area of broadleaf trees, but soon after crossing a gentle mountain ridge we came upon a lofty wall of cypress and cryptomeria trees, nearly as old as I was, that completely covered the long hill sloping down to the northeast. As we drove along the tree-shadowed road I was reminded of a day in my childhood when all the students at the new postwar middle school I attended were rounded up to participate in a mandatory horticultural project: planting tiny saplings to create the very trees we were looking at now.

By and by we arrived at the uppermost border of the Saya, and Tamakichi stopped the truck. Below us I could see a large rock that looked like an old-fashioned boat, if a boat had somehow become embedded in a grassy meadow. My eyes were drawn to a small stream at the bottom of the hill. On the edge of the little brook I spied some signs of human life: Akari was lying on the faded brown grass and Unaiko was sitting next to him, hugging her knees. Tamakichi and I went charging down the slope, heading straight for that spot.

Akari and Unaiko must surely have noticed our approach, but they didn’t react in any visible way. Unaiko, especially, looked completely shell-shocked and tuckered out. As we drew closer we could hear a CD playing — it was Schubert’s piano quintet, the Trout—but then I saw Akari reaching toward the sound system, and the music stopped in mid-trill.

Unaiko spoke first. “I’m so sorry for causing such a ruckus,” she apologized. “It seemed like a much more serious attack than the kind Asa had told me to expect and I panicked, thinking it might be a new problem. I mean, Akari’s entire body was in the throes of major convulsions.”

“Akari, the seizure’s over now, right?” I asked gently. Akari didn’t reply, but his body language seemed to be saying, You can see perfectly well that it is.

“It happened a few minutes after we got here,” Unaiko said. “We parked the car as usual, and right after we’d started walking, we came upon a puddle left over from last night’s rainstorm. We weren’t able to cross it by holding hands, and Akari was a bit nervous about that. We did somehow manage to get across, one at a time, but a moment later he took a tumble. I thought at first he was lying there for fun, laughing in relief, but then I realized that wasn’t the case.” (It was a natural mistake; the expression Akari wore when he was being stoic about pain could easily be mistaken for mirth.) “Anyway, he got up again, and we kept on walking. The seizure happened just as we reached the Saya, and I’m afraid I kind of lost it.”

“In a situation like this, the best remedy for Akari is to lie down and get some rest,” I said. “Akari, do you want to use the restroom before we head back to the Forest House?”

When Akari didn’t reply, Unaiko picked up on the fact that my son was once again giving me the cold shoulder, and she jumped into the chilly void.

“Asa told me to watch out for the loose bowels that often accompany this type of episode,” she said. “We’ve already dealt with that issue, but Akari was upset because he didn’t have a change of trousers or underwear.”

As I handed the emergency bag to Unaiko, I noticed that the lower part of Akari’s body was covered by a large shawl, which I recognized as Unaiko’s. Her jacket was draped on top for good measure.

“If the road to the valley is too muddy to drive on, my truck is up the hill, and we can go back in that,” Tamakichi offered. “I’d be glad to carry Akari to where it’s parked.”

“No, I want to go home in Unaiko’s van,” Akari declared.

“You might fall again,” I pointed out.

“I’ll carry him on my back, so that won’t happen,” Tamakichi said.

“Okay then,” I said to Akari. “Since the worst is over, there’s no big hurry to get back. Let’s rest here for a while longer before we go.”

“Tamakichi, thank you so much for coming to the rescue,” Unaiko said. “I got your cell-phone number from your mom, and … I hate to impose on you even more, but is there any chance of getting a guided tour as long as you’re here? You seem to know a lot about forestry, and I’d love to hear about the trees around the Saya.”

“That’s the easiest request I’ve had all day!” Tamakichi said happily.

“Oh, and also, I heard that during the filming you were responsible for turning the big, flat rock into a stage, so I’m assuming you must have had a chance to read the screenplay?” Unaiko asked rhetorically. “It would be great if I could pick your brain about that, too.”

Tamakichi looked somewhat taken aback by this additional request — or perhaps he was just feeling shy in the presence of an attractive woman — but he nodded, and he and Unaiko set off toward the Saya. Akari had changed into clean clothes behind a nearby tree and was once again reclining on the grass, so I lay down nearby (being careful not to intrude on his space) using the indispensable emergency bag as a pillow.

Gazing upward, I saw that the branches of the trees encircling the Saya were aglow with fresh new leaves of yellowish green, dull red, and every shade in between. I couldn’t be certain from a distance, but there might have been some subtle buds beginning to form as well. Even the mountain cherries looked as though they might be on the brink of bursting into a pale canopy of blossoms over the next few days. Beyond the cherry orchard was a dense backdrop of evergreen trees. They were younger than the tall trees we had seen on the mountain ridge on our way here, but the varieties were the same: the Japanese iterations of cypress and cedar (also known as cryptomeria).

As I was swiveling my head around, I noticed that the bag beneath it felt somehow higher and bulkier than it should have. When I sat up and peered inside, I saw that Akari’s soiled trousers had been stuffed into a trash sack and that bundle (along with a summer blanket I’d added to the emergency kit as I was leaving the house) was taking up a great deal of space. I took out the blanket and went over to where Akari was lying down, then spread it over him from neck to toes. He didn’t move a muscle in response and he kept both palms in place, completely covering his large face.

As I was walking back to my own space, a line of poetry floated through my mind: You didn’t get Kogii ready….

I could see now, more clearly than ever, that “Kogii” was meant to signify Akari. I saw, too, that I was the person — right here, right now — whose job it would be to send him into the forest when the time came. But how was I supposed to go about laying the groundwork for that inevitable process? I hadn’t even begun to make my own preparations for the next step; how on earth was I supposed to facilitate the transition for someone else? I didn’t have a clue. In essence I was still a powerless child, just as I was in the days when everyone called me Kogii. And what about the other long-departed Kogii — the elusive doppelgänger who abandoned me and wafted up into the forest, where the trees meet the sky? If he could look down and see me in my current state of confused fragility, he would probably find it hard to keep from laughing out loud.

By and by another thought drifted across my mind. In a few minutes Unaiko and Tamakichi (who was, of course, doing whatever he could to be of use to her as a stand-in for his absent mother) would be returning from their tour of the Saya, chummier than ever. At some point those two would probably induct Akari into their inner circle as well. And then wasn’t it conceivable that the three of them would somehow get together and conspire to do whatever was necessary to get me (yes, me) ready for my own final journey up into the forest? In that case, perhaps they would help me find a way to conduct myself appropriately during the transition and to move on to the next stage with a measure of ease.

Then I was struck by an even more radical thought: maybe what I had been perceiving as reality all along was nothing but a dream, or an illusion! I thought about everything I had labored so hard to accomplish after moving to Tokyo: all the endless striving, studying, thinking, and writing. Putting aside the question of whether I had accomplished anything worthwhile, what if those eventful years and those supposed achievements were nothing more than figments of my imagination? Suppose that in reality I never even left this village and had been living here all along, from birth until now: my seventy-fourth year. If that were true, I would no doubt be casually getting ready to die a perfectly ordinary death, in the traditional way the old people in this mountain valley surely know by heart, or in their bones. Indeed (I mused, half dreaming) at this very moment Unaiko and Tamakichi could be standing in the shadow of the great meteoric boulder at the top of the slope, talking about how they could help to facilitate my preparations for moving on to the next great adventure …

“Mr. Choko?” My eyes snapped open and I saw Unaiko hovering over me, looking down with a solicitous expression. “If you go on snoozing out here in the open air, you’re going to catch a cold! I mean, I certainly understand how you could be so worn out that you’d need a big nap, after the stress I put you through with the hysterical phone call and all.”

The newly returned twosome soon shifted their attention from me to Akari. Being very careful not to hurt Akari’s back, Tamakichi pulled his cousin to his feet and lifted him into a piggyback position. Tamakichi was a bit shorter than I was, but he was exceptionally strong and muscular from the physical labor of forestry work, and after getting Akari’s considerably larger body snugly ensconced on his back, he loped easily off toward the parking area where Unaiko had left the van. She and I followed a moment later, each carrying some components of the Caveman Group’s professional-quality (but still portable, barely) sound system.

“Tamakichi was telling me about the women Asa brought together at the Saya and how excited they were about being a part of the movie,” Unaiko said as we tramped along. Her weariness appeared to have abated and she sounded even more energized than usual. “When I remarked that supervising such a large group must have been a challenging task, Tamakichi said his mother had told him that the women around here seemed to feel as if they, too, were taking part in an insurrection of sorts, and she was able to coax them into letting those feelings out for the first time in a long while. I’m sure there was probably more to it, but Meisuke’s Mother Marches Off to War seems to have been an unforgettable experience for everyone who took part in the project.”

By the time we got to Unaiko’s van, Tamakichi had already set Akari down and was about to head up to the place above the Saya where he had left his truck. Unaiko thanked my nephew again and again for his help, and then we said our good-byes.

2

That afternoon there was a phone call from Maki. Apparently Asa (who was spending all her time at the hospital with Chikashi) was concerned about Akari’s recent episode and had asked Maki to call and find out how things were going. I suggested that Maki ask Akari directly, and I carried the cordless handset into his room. After what seemed to be a long, leisurely conversation, Akari brought the phone back to me. Maki was still on the other line, and she proceeded to tell me about her chat with her brother.

First, she had told Akari how worried she had been when she heard that he’d had a major seizure deep in the forest, when Papa wasn’t on hand to help. Akari’s response was to paraphrase a quotation from the My Own Words booklet. (He, too, had received a copy from Maki, and since he wasn’t currently engaged in reading musical scores he was probably applying his customary concentration to perusing the little book instead.)

“‘Cause I’m gonna die! Ahhh! I can’t hear my heart beating, even a little bit! I really think I’m dying! My heart isn’t making any sound at all!”

Maki knew that those mock histrionics were Akari’s idea of a joke, but even so, she responded to his concerns point by point in complete seriousness.

“No, Akari, you aren’t going to die,” she said. “The seizure is over now, isn’t it? I guess when you collapsed in the forest, you could probably hear your heart pounding very loudly, right? But don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you’re going to die. And there isn’t any danger when your heart is beating so quietly that you can’t hear it, either.”

Akari had responded with a calmer and more positive remark, which was also an echo of something from My Own Words: “The seizure really hurt a lot, but I hung in there!”

Although Akari was ostensibly talking about his seizure, Maki thought there was a distinct undertone of apprehension about his mother’s illness as well. After assuring Akari that there was no need to worry since his seizure was safely in the past, she added that Mama had come through her surgery very well and was already on the road to recovery.

But when Maki said that, Akari suddenly began to shout something that sounded like a parody or at least a paraphrase of some of the quotations in My Own Words: “No, no, Mama is already dead! Oh, wait, you say she’ll be coming home in two or three weeks? Okay, that’s good, but even if she comes home then, right now she’s dead! Mama is really dead!”

Maki thought that was Akari’s oblique way of showing his true feelings. “Before Mama went into the hospital, she asked you to write down Akari’s quotes from your novels, including the parts where he was somehow conflating his father’s long absence with the idea of death, right?” she said. “It seemed kind of weird that Mama would make such a request at a time when she was dealing with a health crisis of her own, but I think she was just trying to imagine how Akari might respond to the death of one of his parents. Mama knows most of Akari’s quotes by heart, so I’d like to hear her play a game with Akari sometime when they talk on the phone. It could be a sort of call and response. Maybe Akari could say, ‘Mama was in a very bad way, but she pulled through!’ and Mama could respond by saying, ‘Thank you very much — with your support I’ll keep hanging in there and doing my best!’”

Late that night, I got a call from Asa. She had finished her duties at the hospital and was about to take an Odakyu Line train back to my house in Tokyo, where she was staying.

“Today I asked Chikashi whether she might want me to arrange for Unaiko and Ricchan to look after Akari while you made a trip up here to visit her in the hospital,” she began. “But Chikashi said that after all your years together, and all the joy and sadness you’ve shared, she was afraid it would be too hard on you to see your aged wife in such a weakened state, and rather than being able to comfort her, she was worried you might fall into depression or even start blubbering — we laughed at that — and she would need to prop you up instead! (By the way, I was very impressed by her efforts to be sprightly and humorous, making a literary allusion to the famous parable about a devoted old Chinese couple and so on.)

“Seriously, though, I think Chikashi has a valid point. I know that when her brother, Goro, jumped off a building and she had to go to the police station to identify his badly damaged body, she was able to look at it without flinching or turning away. But later, when you went to the wake at Goro’s house down in Yugawara and his widow wanted you to view the body, Chikashi said she thought it would be better if you didn’t, even though by then Goro’s face had been restored to its usual handsome state. She understands better than anyone that you tend to be squeamish about such things.

“On top of that, Chikashi said, ‘In my husband’s current mood I don’t think the kind of visit you’re suggesting is even in the realm of possibility. Ever since he stopped working on the drowning novel he’s been floundering around, and he totally lost control and called his mentally disabled son an idiot — not once, but twice. I know he was annoyed and upset about something on both occasions, but there is simply no excuse for that kind of behavior. No one is angrier at him than Maki, and I’ve been afraid that the tension between those two might come to a head at some point. That’s partly why I recommended that my husband and son go down to Shikoku together, on the assumption that Papa was serious about wanting to take the initiative in patching things up. Not so much for Akari, but for that man, I think reaching some kind of détente with his estranged son should be the first priority right now.’ Anyhow, that’s what Chikashi said. I have to admit I cringed when she referred to you as ‘that man’ again — it just sounds so cold — but on the positive side, she did call you ‘Papa’ once or twice as well.

“Kogii, one thing that fills me with hope is knowing Unaiko and Ricchan will be at the Forest House with you and Akari most of the time. As you know, I truly believe Unaiko is a genius. I’m not saying she’s a towering intellectual or anything, but even if you take her out of the theatrical milieu where she shines so brightly, she’s still a genius. Her special gift is the way she tries to think everything through on her own, in a completely original way, and I’m sure she’ll bring the same approach to bear on the situation between you and Akari. No matter what happens, I’m confident she’ll be a good influence on you. Because she has such a strong sense of certainty about her own beliefs I think she’ll be a reliable touchstone, much as a straightedge helps a carpenter keep things properly lined up.”

3

Ever since the occurrence at the Saya, the bond between Akari and Unaiko seemed to have grown noticeably stronger — and, of course, Ricchan was also a member of their cozy little in-group. The activities that Akari had previously been pursuing in either the dining room or the great room, depending on the theater group’s schedule, were now taking place in the downstairs room Unaiko and Ricchan shared: poring over the classical music program guides in the weekly FM radio magazine and elsewhere, listening to music on the radio, playing CDs, and so on. In that room, which also doubled as the young women’s sleeping quarters, Akari could be absolutely certain his father would never come bumbling in; that was part of an unspoken agreement among the residents of the house. Clearly, Akari was making good on his implicitly declared intention to never again share a single note of music with me.

Some of Akari’s medications were on the verge of running out and he happened to be nearby, listening, when I was talking to Maki on the phone one day about the logistics of refilling those prescriptions. The next morning when Maki called back, Akari piped up to say that if someone from the Forest House was going to Tokyo to get his medicine, he would like to ask them to bring down some of his CDs when they returned. As it turned out, shortly after Akari made the request it became necessary for Unaiko and Ricchan to head to Tokyo on business of their own, so no one had to make a special trip to fetch his prescriptions and CDs.

The news about what Unaiko had done in Matsuyama and at the theater in the round had been spreading by way of the national grapevine. Evidently some prominent theater people had taken notice and were offering her the opportunity to apply her talents to the much larger stages of Tokyo. There were some producers and directors (their names were familiar even to me) who were always on the lookout for innovative and ambitious dramatic work, and they had contacted Unaiko to invite her to meet with them. Asa, of course, was already in Tokyo to help Chikashi through her surgery and recuperation, and it went without saying that Unaiko and Ricchan wanted to share this development with her. I knew that Ricchan — the person most familiar with the sad state of my current relationship with Akari — was also hoping to ask Chikashi, in person, for some information regarding Akari’s daily routines. I was resigned to the fact that any such line of inquiry would inevitably make me look bad and would culminate in more criticism of my behavior from my outspoken wife.

4

Dear Kogii,

At the moment, Unaiko is being lionized by her new cronies in the theater world, and she has been spending every day (and night!) running around Tokyo doing all sorts of exciting and constructive things: seeing plays, visiting rehearsals, going to parties, and so on. She’ll be staying here for a while longer but Ricchan will be back at the Forest House very soon, and she should be able to bring you up to speed on all the details of Chikashi’s condition.

The way things are going, it looks as if Unaiko’s trademark dramatic style may end up being incorporated into a major production at a big theater in Tokyo. Ricchan is actively involved, of course, and she has been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to help advance Unaiko’s career. For me, having a chance to chat at length with Ricchan during this time has been very fruitful, and she also found time to talk to Maki and Chikashi about managing Akari’s health situation. It’s a great relief to me to know someone so conscientious is looking after you and Akari while you’re down on Shikoku.

On the days when Maki took over for me at the hospital and I went back to your house in Seijo to get some rest, Unaiko and Ricchan would always be there waiting up for me, no matter how late the hour, and the three of us would help ourselves to the contents of your liquor cabinet and talk until the wee hours. I suspect the discussions we had about a certain Kogito Choko may have broken some new ground, and I’ll reconstruct one of the conversations here, just for fun.

Unaiko started things off, holding forth about you and your work in general terms. (I’ll skip over that part, since it’s nothing you haven’t heard before.) After a while Ricchan joined in and then — uncharacteristically for her — she took the lead. In keeping with the basic precepts of the dog-tossing method, there was a tape recorder rolling the entire time, even on an informal occasion like this, so I’m able to give a verbatim account of what was said.

“The truth is,” Ricchan began, “ten years ago I hardly knew anything about Mr. Choko’s work. During the time when I was still bouncing around Tokyo doing various sound-related jobs, I booked a one-off assignment for a performance by an up-and-coming theater group. That night I happened to meet one of the group’s volunteer actresses, who was still working an outside job of her own, and I was captivated by her charisma. Needless to say, I’m talking about Unaiko. Before long we were both invited to join the troupe, and working with the Caveman Group became our full-time jobs. Of course, Masao Anai was the group’s leader. At some point he fixed on the idea of turning Kogito Choko’s novels into stage plays, and that became the guiding principle behind his work. So I ended up being in contact with Mr. Choko’s books on a regular basis, but they never really drew me in, personally. Unaiko felt the same way. By the time we were born, of course, Mr. Choko’s best years as a writer were already behind him. I figure kids like us would probably start exploring Japanese literature on our own (that is, outside of school) when we were eighteen or nineteen, maybe later, and even then we would mostly stick with writers of our own generation, so it would never have occurred to us to read Mr. Choko’s work — at least not voluntarily.

“When I first met Masao and the rest of the group, they were focusing on books by contemporary novelists. They didn’t seem to think Mr. Choko fell into that category, although at the same time they saw something interesting in the slightly retro, nostalgic feeling that infuses so much of his work — what you might call a divergence from the now. Still, it wasn’t until several years later that Unaiko really immersed herself in Mr. Choko’s work. It happened when we were doing the adaptation of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, and as we all know, she was exceedingly critical of that book. But now look at her; she’s turned into a full-on Choko freak, even more fanatical than Masao Anai! When I stop to think about it, I realize I’m always a few steps behind Unaiko in everything we do, but at any rate, I’ve finally started reading and appreciating Mr. Choko’s work, too.”

“It was pretty much the same for me, only I was trying to catch up with Masao,” Unaiko acknowledged. “I guess I’m what they call a late adopter.”

Kogii, I was surprised to hear that Unaiko and Ricchan had only recently become acquainted with your work. I told them about an article I’d seen in a theater magazine — you know, “meet the new drama groups” sort of thing — in which a certain critic wrote that while Masao Anai had begun adapting your works into theater pieces early in his career, the group only started having major success with those plays after Unaiko joined the creative team.

Ricchan nodded and said, “I think that’s true, but while Unaiko’s dramatic method may differ from Masao’s style as a director, it’s absolutely consistent within those differences, if that makes sense.”

“It makes perfect sense to me,” Unaiko said with a smile. “Ricchan’s on a roll tonight, so I’ll let her explain how I ended up getting converted.”

“Actually, as I understand it, the thing that transformed Unaiko into a card-carrying Choko devotee wasn’t reading his novels per se,” Ricchan said. “One day she happened to come across something Mr. Choko had written regarding Edward W. Said’s definition of ‘late style,’ and that catalyzed her conversion. She made a photocopy of the page and pinned it above her desk at work, and then she said to me, all excited, ‘This quote from Said is so amazing!’ Said’s basic premise seems to be that when a true artist starts getting on in years, the sort of philosophical mellowness that comes with age can also backfire, and may sometimes even end up having catastrophic consequences.”

“Yes,” Unaiko interrupted excitedly. “Professor Said was riffing on the statement by Adorno that in the history of art, ‘late works are the catastrophes,’ and Said added that work created late in life is not always as serene and transcendent as you might expect. It’s been a while since I looked at those quotes, but as I recall Said was talking about Beethoven.”

“To me,” Ricchan went on, “it seems as if it would be beneficial for an aging author to weather that kind of stormy situation alone, and if such adversity ended up being the crucible in which his later work was forged, well, wouldn’t it be a good thing? I mean, isn’t the freedom to charge blindly ahead into the uncharted realm of one’s own late work one of the perks of being old? Even so, I couldn’t help feeling it just wasn’t right, somehow, for a thirtysomething woman like Unaiko to be sitting sit around hoping that an older person would go galloping headlong into catastrophe! But since Mr. Choko has abandoned the drowning novel, and he and Akari are living at the Forest House, it’s making me very happy to see how easy it seems to be for Unaiko to hang out with both of them, and vice versa. And when Akari had his seizure and I saw how flustered Unaiko was, I couldn’t help thinking, Wow, she’s really changed a lot. That is to say, I feel as though she’s become more human and more compassionate than when we first met.”

“When you say something like that it really makes me realize how selfishly I must have behaved toward you, Ricchan,” Unaiko said solemnly, with a self-effacing modesty that was very different from her usual confident, assertive personality.

“No, no, not at all!” Ricchan protested. “I’ve always depended on you for everything, Unaiko, and I have every intention of continuing to do so going forward. I really can’t imagine living any other way.” She was unmistakably sincere but I sensed an undertone of affectionate teasing beneath her words.

Somehow, hearing Unaiko apologize for her past behavior confirmed my sense that joining forces with her, and with Ricchan, for my own late work (so to speak) had been the right decision, without a doubt. At the same time I got the heartening feeling that Unaiko was no longer just the ambitious, talented girl-genius dramatist, but was also — and this was more important to me and, clearly, to Ricchan as well — developing into a more complete and empathetic human being.

As our conversation continued, I posed this question: “Unaiko, this is something I was planning to ask Masao, but I’d like to hear your thoughts, too. Up until now, the Caveman Group has derived a large measure of its inspiration from my brother’s fiction, and while you were waiting for him to finish his own late work, the so-called drowning novel, you were planning to combine the saga of his work on the book with the story about how our father went out one night and drowned in the river. I know you even recorded some interviews with my brother, to use as a resource. What I was wondering is, how were you and Masao proposing to put the Caveman Group’s distinctive theatrical stamp on the novel if it had come to fruition? Or maybe I should ask how you were planning to fit the book into the dog-tossing mold that’s been so successful for you?”

“Well, we were looking at those initial recording sessions as preliminaries, like a dry run,” Unaiko replied. “We were just trying to get a handle on the general parameters of Mr. Choko’s drowning novel so we could start figuring out how to go about dramatizing it. Really, everything was pretty nebulous at that point.

“The idea was that Masao and I would sort of lurk around the Forest House and observe Mr. Choko while he was in the process of writing, and he seemed to be amenable to that. Of course, you of all people were already well aware of the arrangement, Asa. We were also hoping to be able to create a kind of synergy between Masao’s usual style and my own dog-tossing approach. (In both cases, we would have been counting on Mr. Choko’s active participation.) Then we would have tried to combine the two elements into a cohesive dramatic piece. The thing is, for me — and I think the same was true for Masao — the only concrete ideas I had were about the first and last scenes.

“The first scene was going to be something we’d heard about from Mr. Choko: a scenario from the recurrent dream he’s been having for the past sixty years or so. It’s night, and against the backdrop of a flood-swollen river we see your father, illuminated by the moon and looking away from us, sitting in a small rowboat. Meanwhile, a sort of Greek chorus of actors is onstage, chanting the story of a young boy who is struggling to reach the boat with the cold, muddy water lapping against his chest. Suspended high above the stage, the young boy’s supernatural alter ego, Kogii, is gazing down on the action.

“Not surprisingly, the idea for the other scene also came from something Mr. Choko told us. It was going to evoke the last image in the drowning novel, and the idea would have been to have the book’s final words read aloud, verbatim, by me and the other actors onstage. Those words would have suggested the thoughts that were going through the father’s mind just as he was about to drown. Then all the reciters would have been sucked into the whirlpool themselves, while the Kogii doll looked on from above.

“When we talk about it like this, though, it isn’t clear how the book would have been constructed, or how the story would have unfolded scene by scene. To be honest, I get the feeling the only thing floating around in Mr. Choko’s head might have been those T. S. Eliot lines about the Phoenician sailor drowning in the whirlpool.”

Unaiko lapsed into a thoughtful silence, and I found myself remembering the lines she mentioned. I imagine the same thing must be happening to you, Kogii, while you’re reading this fax:

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

5

Dear Kogii,

The day after the late-night conversation I described in my previous fax, Ricchan came to the hospital to say her good-byes to Chikashi, and that allowed me to grab a few winks in a nearby chair. While I was napping Chikashi apparently started talking to Ricchan about your late work, and Ricchan gave me a blow-by-blow account of their conversation after I woke up. I’ll transcribe it here from memory:

Apparently the first thing Chikashi said to Ricchan was this: “Choko went down to the forests of Shikoku to write his drowning novel, but he ended up abandoning it instead. He’s been living the writer’s life for a long time now, but he quit rather easily on what was supposed to be the crowning work of his career. Even if the project is out of the picture for good, Choko will probably live for quite a few more years, so the question is, how can he move ahead with his late work? When my brother, Goro, died in such a horrible way, a lot of his colleagues in the movie business were saying his best work was behind him and his career was probably over anyway, but I believe if he had gone on living he would have produced some new films that were every bit as good as his previous work.

“My husband never seemed to have much to say about Goro’s films, one way or another, but there’s a recording of a seminar Choko gave while he was teaching at the Free University in Berlin. I’ve listened to it so many times that I know it almost by heart, but I’ll just paraphrase the highlights.

“Apparently in Goro’s later years he didn’t tend to take his interviews with Japanese journalists very seriously, but he responded differently when he was talking to the passionate cinema buffs he encountered in his travels overseas. In the seminar, my husband said he had read a number of newspaper articles about Goro in English and French, but since he doesn’t know much German, he asked some of his university students in Berlin to find similar articles in German publications and then put together essay-style reports about them in English. Based on that research, he concluded that Goro would have gone on to make a number of films in the future, if he had lived. I remember that my husband concluded his little speech by saying, ‘So why would Goro have decided to commit suicide in the prime of life? I really have no idea.’

“My husband tends to torment himself and keep his worries bottled up inside,” Chikashi went on, “but lately I know he’s been trying to rebuild his relationship with Akari in his own slow, silent way. And even though he’s feeling rather discouraged about his writing these days, I believe my husband is an optimist at heart and I think it’s very likely that he (like Goro, if he had lived) will eventually find his way to the late work he’s meant to do, whatever it might turn out to be. If someone were to theorize that Kogito felt more relief than disappointment about the failure of the drowning novel, well, I would have to disagree.”

Kogii, I hope you’ll take Chikashi’s words, which were spoken not long after she had been through a serious operation, as her way of trying to cheer you on from afar.

I also want to share something else I heard. Ricchan has been a huge help to Maki — in fact, apart from the days when Ricchan needed to go somewhere with Unaiko, she has spent all her time in Tokyo making herself useful around the house in Seijo — and even though she and Maki have low-key, easygoing personalities, they both share the trait of being willing to voice hard truths when they feel the need. They’ve come to trust each other, and that’s probably why Maki felt comfortable saying this to Ricchan:

“My mother realized that sending my father and Akari off to Shikoku together under the current circumstances could create problems for you, but she did it anyway. I think it was because she wasn’t confident she would survive the surgery, and she felt uneasy about having my father and brother around during a time like that. Before she went into the hospital she tidied up a lot of loose ends, and after she was admitted she wouldn’t let either one of them come to visit her. I think sending them to stay on Shikoku was her way of forcing them to find a way to go on living together after she was gone, and she was hoping their time down there would help.

“When I went to the airport to see my father and Akari off to Shikoku — and also to meet my aunt Asa, who had just flown in — I got the sense that Akari knew what was going on with our mother and was aware of what the worst-case outcome could be. He seemed so lost and depressed that I impulsively blurted out, ‘Mama is going to come home from the hospital around the beginning of May,’ even though I knew as I was saying those words that they could undermine my mother’s intentions.

“Akari’s response was typical of his peculiar sense of humor — in fact, it was a playful variation on one of his quotes from the little book I put together. He said, ‘Oh, is that so? Mama’s coming home at the beginning of May? Well, even if she comes home then, right now she’s dead. Mama is really dead!’”

Kogii, I can’t help thinking about one of the terms you’re so fond of: “rebirth.” Isn’t that the essence of what Akari is talking about here and in My Own Words as well?

Chapter 10. A Memory … or the Coda to a Dream

1

When Unaiko was offered a four-week job as guest director at a large theater — a far cry from the small-scale venues where she had been mounting her own productions — she naturally jumped at the opportunity. There was nothing more for Ricchan to do, so she left Tokyo as soon as she had finished attending to some personal business of her own.

Ricchan’s first task after returning to the Forest House had been to rearrange the room she shared with Unaiko to create a designated space for Akari. He immediately settled into his downstairs pied-à-terre and busied himself with organizing the CDs Ricchan had brought back from Tokyo for him. After spending half a day lining up the discs according to his own method of classification he began listening to one track from each CD, starting with a Piazzolla piece for guitar, until he’d worked his way through the entire stack.

Meanwhile, Ricchan came upstairs to clean my study/bedroom. While she worked, she told me about her farewell conversation with Chikashi at the hospital, although of course (as Ricchan knew) Asa had already given me a partial recap. While she was bundling some sheets, pillowcases, and pajamas to be laundered, Ricchan caught sight of the photograph of Unaiko’s heroic onstage pose, which I had tucked away on the bookshelf with my big dictionaries, and she quietly moved it to a more conspicuous place. Then she mentioned having noticed that Chikashi had only one photo of her late brother, Goro, on display in her hospital room — and even that was just a book cover rather than a framed photo.

“It’s been ten years since Goro died,” I said, “and some books are finally coming out now that aren’t completely tainted by the tabloid newspaper scandal everyone was obsessed with immediately after his death. The photo was probably taken by a young photographer friend of Goro’s, whom we’d heard about but never met. Chikashi said it was an unusually relaxed-looking photo of Goro, and she added that for someone who was in the film business, he was surprisingly self-conscious about being photographed.”

Ricchan nodded. “I mentioned to Chikashi that I couldn’t help noticing there weren’t any photos of Akari, or of you, Mr. Choko. I was really just making small talk, with no particular agenda, but she seemed to be thinking carefully about how to reply. Finally she said there was one photo of Akari she particularly liked — a black-and-white portrait that was on the cover of a magazine after sales of his second CD took off — but it was too large to bring to the hospital. She also mentioned that something she’s noticed about photographs of young people with brain damage (and she seemed a bit hesitant about saying this) is that most of the photos somehow seemed to emphasize those disabilities. She thinks it has as much to do with the photographers as with the subjects. But in the magazine photo, she said, Akari looks completely natural and relaxed. Then she went on to add, ‘As for a photograph of my husband, there’s one Goro took when they were both in high school, but it’s the polar opposite of a candid shot. It was posed within an inch of its life, but it’s still oddly unforgettable.’

“When I said I would very much like to see the photograph, Chikashi told me it was published in The Changeling, as an illustration amid the pages where you talk about what was going on at that time in your life. So while Maki and I were at your house, sorting through Akari’s CDs and choosing a few for me to bring here, I helped myself to a copy. I haven’t had time to read it yet, and I haven’t looked at the photo, either.”

2

While she was in Tokyo, Ricchan went to the university hospital to pick up some of Akari’s prescriptions, and she asked the pharmacists for advice about the major seizure Akari had experienced in the forest. They told her increasing the dosages of any of his meds wasn’t an option and cautioned that special care should be taken to ensure he was getting enough exercise. As soon as she got back to the Forest House, Ricchan instituted a more rigorous fitness program based on walking and calisthenics interspersed with rest periods. She added a water flask to Akari’s portable kit (this was a new addition), and on her first morning back they set out together.

Not long afterward, Daio dropped by. After touching on several innocuous household matters, the conversation soon progressed to a more volatile topic: Unaiko and Ricchan’s latest dog-tossing project.

“Since my training camp went bust I haven’t really gotten together with any of my former disciples, but a number of them have become quite influential, both in the local prefectural government and elsewhere,” Daio began. “One way or another, I hear things, and they’re apparently keeping tabs on me as well. The other day I happened to run into a man who’s in touch with some of those guys; he’s in the shipping and transport business, so I guess he gets around quite a bit.

“Anyhow, this person was expressing concern about Unaiko’s theatrical work and also about my own involvement with her group. He kept harping on the open-discussion format in the latter part of the plays — which, as you’ve surely heard, was the talk of the countryside around here (and not always in a good way!) after the performance at the junior high school. He was saying the faction that opposed whatever opinion she was espousing always seemed to be on the losing side of the dog-tossing battles, and he was complaining because he felt the other side (which was, in his opinion, making a fair point) inevitably ended up being ‘covered in dead dogs,’ as he put it. He believes Unaiko’s plays are biased, and he seemed to be blaming you, Kogito, at least in part. He said you didn’t come back here for the longest time, but as soon as you arrived, earlier this month, there was a sudden spike in what he called ‘subversive activity’ at the Forest House. (Apparently his spies are everywhere.) Suffice it to say he and his right-wing cronies have never been your biggest fans — and as you know better than anyone, that’s putting it mildly — and now they’ve gotten themselves all worked up with righteous indignation about Unaiko and her avant-garde approach to drama. This isn’t over, by a long shot.”

We talked for a few more minutes about local politics, and then I said, “On another topic, when I decided to abandon my drowning novel, Asa told me you were happy about my decision because of your deep loyalty to my mother. She also said that since the red leather trunk is out of the picture and won’t be causing any problems in the future, you were hoping to renew our acquaintance. I gather that’s why we’re having the pleasure of seeing you around again on a regular basis, after all these years.

“In any event, it so happens that you’re the person I want most to talk to right now. As you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about my father lately. You’ve suggested in passing that he had a stronger interest in the realms of literature and folklore than in politics as such, and what you’ve told me about the way his reading preferences also tended to skew in those directions strikes me as a very strong clue. After I went through the contents of the red leather trunk and found those three volumes of Frazer’s The Golden Bough—in the original English, no less! — I lugged those books back to Tokyo and started to read my way through them, a few pages at a time. However, because of some, uh, family issues, I put the project on hold.

“Since arriving here I’ve gotten back into the mood to read all three volumes in their entirety, but first I wanted to ask you a question. Do you have any idea why my father would have given those books — and those books alone — such preferential treatment, even going to the trouble of packing them in the trunk when he set out on his getaway run?”

Daio stared at me with such intensity that after a second I had to look away. I focused instead on the garden behind him, where the trees had just begun to put forth the fresh new foliage of spring: the reddish shoots of the pomegranate, the yellow-green leaflings of the Konara oak. I remembered that during my previous reunion with Daio, back when Goro and I were both attending high school in Matsuyama, Daio had sometimes had this same coruscating light in his eyes. Finally he spoke, and his manner threw those old memories into even sharper relief for me.

“You’re wondering about those books,” he said. “I don’t read English, but I do have some ideas about why your father might have been so interested in them. I’d like very much to talk to you about that but first I need to gather my thoughts, and I’m not quite there yet. Would you mind waiting a bit longer?”

3

With both Unaiko and Asa away in Tokyo, Ricchan was working even harder than usual. In the beginning I didn’t have a clear sense of how the members of the Caveman Group were managing to get by financially, although I was aware that the younger members always seemed to be juggling a variety of part-time jobs. When it came to the weekly expenses for Akari and me, Asa mentioned up front that I needed to contribute such-and-such a sum, so I was regularly depositing the prescribed amount, along with a bit extra, in an empty biscuit tin that was a permanent fixture on the dining-room table. However, when I lifted the lid at the beginning of every week to replenish the cash, I always found an assortment of receipts along with leftover funds in the form of coins and paper currency.

Since Ricchan was helping us in many different ways I asked whether I could at least pay her something comparable to the hourly wages Daio had agreed to accept, but she refused even to discuss the matter, saying simply, “Let’s wait till Asa gets back.”

I felt uneasy about the existing arrangement because Ricchan didn’t merely keep up with household chores and prepare all our meals; she also looked after Akari on a daily basis. On top of that, while Unaiko was away doing her guest-artist stint at a big theater in Tokyo, Ricchan was attending to a variety of managerial duties, both for the Caveman Group and for Unaiko’s next big dramatic project. (Ricchan tended to be somewhat closemouthed, but I did manage to learn Unaiko had been cast as a last-minute replacement for a well-known actress, which had delayed her return to Shikoku.) No doubt about it: Ricchan was an exceptionally diligent worker and a woman of many talents. As for Daio, he cheerfully lent a hand around the house and also took care of any outdoor-maintenance tasks Ricchan suggested.

No matter how busy she was with her other obligations, Ricchan was always remarkably conscientious about Akari’s rehabilitation program, and every day — unless it happened to be raining — she would drive him to the Saya and assist him in his quest to strengthen the muscles surrounding the injured thoracic vertebra, while being careful not to inflict further damage. During these workout sessions Akari was free to play his chosen music, cranked up as loud as he pleased, and he must have found those freewheeling interludes a welcome release from the oppressive tension of sharing a house with me in our current state of estrangement.

Ricchan’s days were filled to overflowing, but she was so adept at multitasking that she somehow found time to go out in the field on a regular basis and collect oral histories from some of the people who lived along the riverside and on the slope below the Saya. Although Ricchan didn’t talk much about this, I gathered from Daio that this research was part of the groundwork for the next dog-tossing project: a major theatrical presentation that Unaiko, Asa, and Ricchan would be collaborating on in the near future.

Evidently Ricchan was trying to interview people who had been involved in the filming of Asa’s ill-starred movie about our local heroine, Meisuke’s mother. (No one ever used her given name, nor had I ever heard a single mention of Meisuke’s father.) Daio seemed certain that Unaiko and Ricchan’s next project was going to be an attempt to dramatize a famous guerrilla insurrection that took place after the Meiji Restoration, using Unaiko’s distinctive method of interactive theater. And, he added excitedly, they were hoping to use the screenplay I’d written for Asa’s film, Meisuke’s Mother Marches Off to War (which was based on actual history mixed in with some well-known local lore), as a source of guidance and inspiration — if they could ever get their hands on a copy of it.

When Ricchan learned that Daio had already spilled the beans about this nascent plan, she decided to tell me why it had been kept under wraps. There were two reasons for the cloak of secrecy, and she explained them fully, albeit with her usual verbal economy. Reason number one: Asa was all in favor of having her brother (i.e., me) take a helpful role in the new project, and she had promised to nudge me gently in that direction. However, given the distressing complexity of my current situation (quite aside from the lingering repercussions from the Big Vertigo, I was having to cope with my wife’s serious illness as well as with some monumental difficulties in my relationship with my son) Asa had suggested that it might be more considerate to wait awhile before depositing anything new on my plate, so to speak.

Ricchan went on to say that Unaiko had her heart set on putting together a play shaped by some mysterious theme derived from her personal history — a motif that apparently echoed the story of the insurrection on some level. Ricchan, by way of preliminary preparations, had been visiting the Honmachi library to look for archival materials pertaining to the uprising, while also gathering anecdotal evidence by talking to local women who had actually participated in the filming of the movie.

After that disclosure there was no further need to keep me in the dark, and Ricchan’s fieldwork became a frequent topic of conversation around the dining-room table at the Forest House. One evening Akari, who had clearly been pondering something throughout the meal, left the table and trudged up the stairs to his room with an air of determination. A few moments later, he came back down clutching what appeared to be a large, custom-bound portfolio covered in blue cloth. (Back in Tokyo, Maki had sorted through her brother’s effects and had mailed him a number of things, apparently including this portfolio.)

Still hugging the large blue folder, Akari announced: “Okay, this is it. The sheet music for the Beethoven piano sonata is in here, too.” It was obvious that while he didn’t want to hand the blue binder over to me directly, this was his oblique way of prodding me to explain the contents to Ricchan. “Mrs. Sakura Ogi Magarshack gave it to me,” he added.

“Oh, I know,” I said, as recollection kicked in. “It’s the copy of the final shooting script Sakura gave you to commemorate the completion of the film, when she returned the Beethoven sheet music you loaned her while they were recording the sound track.”

While I was speaking Akari had presented the blue portfolio to Ricchan, but when she opened the cloth cover the sheet music inside (just as Akari had said) fell to the floor. Akari bent over to pick up the pages with an easy alacrity, and it was evident that his muscle-building physical therapy was already yielding results in the form of flexibility and diminished discomfort. After shuffling the sheet music into the proper order, he handed it back to Ricchan.

“All the people I’ve interviewed who were working as extras in the scenes filmed up at the Saya have talked about the way the sound of this music rang out over the meadows,” Ricchan said. “I told you about the women who were talking about that, right? Hearing Sakura Ogi Magarshack perform her battle-cry recitative with this music playing in the background seems to have made a deeper impression on them than almost anything else about the filming.”

“Sakura had the idea of using this Beethoven sonata in the movie, even though it reminded her of some painful memories from her childhood,” I said. “She knew the title of the piece, but it was Akari who helped her to find a recording of the specific performance she had in mind. Sakura was very impressed, as I recall. Akari also figured out the precise length of all the passages that would need to be included in the sound track, and he made those notations on his own copy of the sheet music before he passed it along to the NHK orchestra.”

Ricchan looked thoughtfully at Akari, who was holding the score open to the relevant pages. Then she said, “Akari, do you by any chance have a CD of the performance you chose?”

“You bet I do!” Akari exclaimed enthusiastically. “You’re the one who brought it down from Tokyo for me, Ricchan!” With that, he ran upstairs again, his face alight with an animation I hadn’t seen in recent memory.

Meanwhile, Ricchan and I set about plugging in the sophisticated sound system set up in the great room for use in rehearsals. The speakers were on either side of the raised, brick-floored area that served as a makeshift stage, and in order to maximize the acoustics Ricchan opened the curtains at the south end of the room. During our sojourn at the Forest House, Akari and I had been getting by with just the light from the plate-glass window on the north end. When the young people needed to use the space for rehearsal, we would go upstairs to wait it out. They would open the curtains while the room was in use and then close them again before returning the living area to us.

I knew from previous visits that beyond the window, as springtime marched along, you could see the maples, with their wine-colored buds gradually shading into the palest green; the tall, lush-leafed white birches; two kinds of flowering persimmons — one with edible fruit, the other strictly ornamental; and, finally, the late-blooming dogwoods (both red and white). This spring, however, we had kept the curtains perpetually closed on the south-side garden, so we had missed the seasonal parade of loveliness. The realization struck me as a poignant reminder of the stifling, hermetic existence Akari and I had been mired in since arriving here.

Akari returned with the CD, and as the opulent sound of Beethoven filled every atom of the cavernous space, he was clearly transported into some private realm of sublimity. (Both the composition — the Piano Sonata no. 32 in C Minor, op. 111—and the performance, by Friedrich Gulda, were among his particular favorites.) When the recording reached the second movement, which was the section of the piece used in the film, Akari lifted his head from the score and gave Ricchan a meaningful glance as if to say, This is it.

Ricchan was sitting with the screenplay for Meisuke’s Mother Marches Off to War open on her knees, and she caught Akari’s eye and solemnly bobbed her head, to show she had gotten the message.

4

The next morning, before Akari had emerged from his bedroom and joined us at the breakfast table, Ricchan informed me that she had already called Asa and Unaiko to share the exciting news about the unexpected appearance of the screenplay.

“Asa responded cautiously, as usual. She was happy that I’ve finally gotten a chance to read your version of the story of Meisuke’s mother, but she reminded me that we’d agreed not to pressure you into getting involved with our project on any particular timetable. She also suggested that I ought to take your screenplay with several grains of salt because your interpretation of the saga ‘reeks of male chauvinism,’ as she put it. She said I should tread very carefully going forward.

“Unaiko was really happy to hear that a copy of the screenplay had turned up, and she seems to be eager to forge ahead and express her own concerns through the medium of our upcoming collaboration. As you know, I’ve been asking people from around here to talk about their experiences as extras in the film about Meisuke’s mother, and since I’m passing everything on to Unaiko bit by bit and then taking notes on her comments, I’ve been learning a lot about her method of putting together a dramatic piece. Of course, I hope our wavelengths will eventually become synchronized to the point where I’ll be able to intuit things without even having to ask.

“Regarding the recitative that features so prominently in your screenplay, I asked a number of locals to try to recite it from memory, and I was able to record quite a few different versions. (I gather you can still hear parts of the battle chant — you know, where Meisuke’s mother is rallying her troops before they march off to stage the uprising — at Bon Odori celebrations around these parts.) I’d almost like to say that every person’s rendition was different — both the words and the melody. When I saw the version in the screenplay I said to myself, ‘Ah, this must be written in the slightly old-fashioned style Mr. Choko’s mother and grandmother used when they were reciting this.’ I had to read this part over and over to Unaiko on the phone, but I’m afraid my rendition sounded kind of singsongy. Wait, I’ll show you.” Whereupon Ricchan began to recite, in her trained-musician’s voice:

Women warriors, let us go

Off to face our latest foe.

Into battle we will soar

Strong and brave forevermore.

All together, here we go

We shall vanquish every foe!

“In the screenplay,” Ricchan went on without waiting for me to react, “you used a form of the chant that had apparently been around for a long time, and the chorus section was also in an archaic literary style. I asked Asa whether that was the way you would have heard the recitative from your mother and grandmother when you were a little boy, and she said that, on the contrary, she thought the chant in the screenplay was the result of your applying your novelist’s skills to rewriting it over and over. During the time Unaiko and I have been recording the local women’s memories, in all their disparity, I’ve been entering those accounts into the computer, and it did occur to me that if I kept revising and polishing during the process, we would eventually arrive at a kind of literary style of our own. I was quite excited, but when I mentioned it to Unaiko, she said that since there’s a specific theme she wants to express through this play, she wants to see our play’s language evolve naturally.”

“She’s absolutely right that the theme should shape the literary style,” I said. “It really ought to work that way with any writing project, and I think a distinctive style can be the most compelling part of the whole.”

“When I told Unaiko that Akari had unexpectedly shared his copy of the screenplay, the first thing she wanted to know was how Meisuke’s mother’s remarks were presented,” Ricchan said. “She was wondering about one scene in particular. It takes place just after the second uprising, which was led by the teenage reincarnation of the original Meisuke. His mother (who was, of course, the mother of the first Meisuke as well) and her troops have broken camp in Okawara, and the mother and her eight-year-old son are on the way back to their village when they are surrounded by a group of young hooligans — unemployed former samurai who are filled with freefloating resentment and looking for trouble. These brutes trap young Meisuke II in a hole and stone him to death, and then a bunch of them gang-rape his mother.

“After the ruffians are gone Meisuke’s mother, who is injured and unable to walk, is carried home to the village by her supporters on a stretcher made from an old wooden shutter. The procession stops at a sake brewery, and while the proprietor is making a show of giving them some water to drink, it’s obvious he is consumed with prurient curiosity. So how does Meisuke’s mother respond to his oblique inquiries in the script? When I posed the question to some of the women who participated in the making of the movie, most of them remembered her saying something like ‘If you’re so curious about how it was, kind sir, maybe you should try being raped yourself sometime!’”

I didn’t respond, and Ricchan seemed to cast a mildly critical glance in my direction before she went on speaking. “So anyway, when Unaiko posed that question I had a major epiphany, and I understood for the first time why she was creating this new play and what its theme was going to be as well,” she said. “I made up my mind then that no matter what happened I would do everything I could, without compromise, to help Unaiko find the language to get her message across.”

Once again, I sat there in unresponsive silence, not sure what to make of this cryptic disclosure. After a beat or two I said, “I gather you’re planning to begin by performing this piece at the junior high’s theater in the round. In that case, many of the women you’ve been interviewing will most likely be in attendance, so it’s probably safe to assume they’ll be drawn into the interactive dialogue and the hurling of soft toys that are an integral part of the dog-tossing approach to theater.”

“Absolutely!” Ricchan chirped. “In fact, every time I go out to do these interviews I’ve been promising to invite them all to the premiere when the time comes. I tell everyone I meet that I really hope they’ll come with their arms full of handcrafted ‘dead dogs’ they’ve created themselves at home!”

5

Daio and I were standing side by side in the Saya, up to our ankles in fresh green grass, leaning back against the big meteoric boulder while our conversation meandered aimlessly along.

“This is something I heard from Asa,” Daio said, abruptly switching gears from unfocused small talk, “but I gather you still have a very clear memory of the scene that night when your father set out on the stormy, flooded river.”

“Actually, the account I shared with Asa and Unaiko — the version I was planning to use as the prologue of my drowning novel — is different from the memory of what I actually saw that night,” I said. “For a very long time, I kept having a recurrent dream that was almost always exactly the same in every detail, and the prologue was based on my dream. At this point I honestly don’t know whether my memories have been retroactively shaped by the endless repetitions of that dream, or whether the dream reflects my actual experience.”

Daio nodded thoughtfully. “Well, if it hadn’t been a dream, your supernatural alter ego wouldn’t have been standing on the boat next to your father,” he said. “I remember hearing that you used to insist there was another child who was an exact duplicate of you living in your house. That was the same Kogii from the dream, right? The story of Kogii was well known around the village, and I heard people mention it more than once after I returned from China. It was one of the things that made me begin to realize what an unusual person you were, from a very young age. As for your dream, I’ve heard about it quite a few times from various sources, but it still knocks me for a loop every time someone mentions offhandedly that Choko Sensei set out on the river with your double standing next to him.

“That’s because I was there, watching, and I have a very clear memory of seeing you! You probably didn’t even notice me, did you? As you’ll recall, the officers and I used to visit your father, and in the old stone storehouse where we talked and ate and slept, there was a big room with a floor that was half dirt and half wooden planks. It was where your father kept his vintage Takara-brand barber’s chair, which everyone understood was for his private use only. That night, I had spread a futon in the interior part of the room and had just settled down to try to get some sleep. Right about then you came in from outside, alone. There was one light burning — a single bulb with an air-raid shade, which illuminated the path to the staircase leading to the second floor. I started to get up because I assumed you had been sent to tell me that your father wanted me to do some task or other, but then I saw that you appeared to have something on your mind. You left your sandals in the entryway and crossed the dirt-floored room to the staircase without ever raising your head, so I just pretended to be asleep. I felt a lot of contempt for myself at that moment, and I remember thinking, What good am I to anyone, anyhow, with only one arm?

“In the big room upstairs there were three young conscripts from the flight-training school along with a couple of young officers who basically made a cottage industry out of ordering me around, and they had all presumably gone to sleep. After a few minutes you came back downstairs, carrying something wrapped in a raincoat. As soon as you went outside again, I got up and tiptoed up the stairs to check whether the officers were awake.

“The thing you were carrying wasn’t very large, but it had sharp corners, so I naturally assumed it must be the red leather trunk. Earlier in the day, sometime around noon, the officers had been worrying that maybe your father wasn’t planning to come over to the outbuilding where we were bunking. They decided that they needed to get their hands on the red leather trunk as a way of finding out whether your father might be plotting some extreme course of action on his own, so they sent me to the main house to fetch it. By early evening the serious partying was well under way, but the only ones who were drinking heavily were the officers and the young navy pilots. The night before there had been a big strategy meeting and, as the officers put it later, they had a breakdown in their talks with your father. He withdrew to the house and didn’t show his face in our quarters the next day, so when I came back with the red leather trunk the officers pulled off the raincoat it was wrapped in and everyone crowded around eagerly to see what was inside. But the thing is, the contents turned out to be a complete disappointment, to the point where the officers were actually laughing and saying rude things like ‘Hey, there’s just a bunch of boring crap in here!’

“I didn’t say anything, but since they were rifling through Sensei’s private property I kept an eye on them the entire time from a corner of the room. One thing I remember clearly was the three heavy books — I wouldn’t have been able to read the titles from a distance, especially since they were written in English, but years later, when I was helping your mother with her annual spring cleaning, I saw those books again. That was when it hit me that they must be the same ones we had carried back from a visit to the Kochi Sensei’s house, when I trekked down there once with your father. And this time, when your mother wasn’t looking, I copied down the title on a scrap of paper. It was The Golden Bough, and there were three big, thick volumes.

“Getting back to the fateful day in 1945, apart from those books the trunk mainly contained an assortment of papers and letters, tied in neat bundles. The army officers examined the envelopes and their contents, one by one, and then returned most of them to the trunk. There was an oblong hibachi in the room that was being used for warming sake or heating stewpots, and some of the letters ended up getting tossed onto the coals and going up in flames. As for the rest of the stuff from the trunk — well, your family was in the paper business so there probably would have been an oilcloth, or something of the sort, lying around. But anyhow, the officers wrapped the remaining materials in water-repellent paper and put them back in the trunk, and then they rewrapped the trunk in one of the raincoats we used to wear when we went into the mountains to work. So that was the red leather trunk you came to pick up late that night.”

“You know, it’s strange, but I have no memory of the part of the evening you’ve just described,” I mused. “I don’t remember going to get the trunk late that night at all, although I do recall having a small role in packing it earlier in the day. The thing I do recollect with what feels like absolute certainty is the scene that took place a while later.

“Picture this, if you will. My father has already boarded the little boat. I’m in the water nearby, and I have just handed him the red leather trunk. Looking back toward the shore, I notice one of the ropes that keeps the wooden barrels securely moored — you know, the barrels we used for the spider lily bulbs — is about to be torn loose by the current, so I plow through the chilly water with the muddy waves lapping against my chest, intending to tie a better knot. That’s what happens in the dream, too, so it’s possible my memories may have gradually modified themselves to match the dream. At any rate, the mooring rope for the boat was tied to the same metal ring, which was embedded in a stretch of poured concrete along the shoreline. But isn’t it possible that I’m going back because my father has asked me to untie the mooring line so the boat can cast off? Come to think of it, I realize that must be what happened. It wasn’t about the barrels at all. And then — I don’t know whether I didn’t have time to return to the boat, or maybe I turned around and saw it being catapulted into the middle of the river by the force of the waves, but in any case it was gone. And that’s the story of what happened that night, in a nutshell.”

“Good heavens, Kogito. All these years you’ve been reliving that night over and over in your dreams, torturing yourself with guilt, and while we’re talking you suddenly realize that you didn’t get sidetracked by some trivial issue with a wooden barrel and literally miss the boat? Now, this is pure conjecture, but it seems to me that if your father was ready to take off he wouldn’t have needed to send you back to shore to untie the mooring rope. He could have cut it with the short sword he used for trimming the paperbush bark and so on, which was always hanging from his belt. He set out on the boat trip with no plans to return home, right? So he wouldn’t have needed to use the rope again to tie up the boat, since he would have simply abandoned it when he got to his first destination, downriver. You know, Kogito, the more I think about it the more convinced I am that your father consciously intended to leave you behind, and sending you to cut the mooring rope could have been his way of saving your life!

“And then, of course, Choko Sensei ended up drowning in the river. It was only a few days earlier that you had precociously pointed out that your father was mistaking one complex kanji for a similar-looking one — you know, when he misread the water-related 淼 淼 for the woodsy 森 森? This may be a stretch, but given the way things turned out, doesn’t it strike you that your father’s misreading may actually have been oddly apt and even prescient on a deeper level? What I mean is that in his last moments of existence Sensei wasn’t really being borne along to the end of the river, where it becomes one with the vast and endless sea. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this: I’m talking about the belief around these parts that when people die, their spirits go up into the forest and settle at the base of one particular, foreordained tree. In other words, while your father may have taken his last breath on the water, I think he was really on his way back to the forest!

“Of course, I wasn’t born here, so there’s probably no spirit tree in the forest with my name on it. Even so, when it comes time for me to die, I’d like to believe my soul could go to a place in some cosmic forest and find refuge and salvation there. By the way, Asa mentioned that the poem you collaborated on with your mother wasn’t exactly well received, but I really like it a lot. Of course, Akari was born and raised in Tokyo, but I think that if you’re very careful to make the proper preparations well in advance, when Akari’s time comes his spirit should be able to go up into the forest and find its way to its own designated tree.”

Although Daio wasn’t originally from Shikoku, he had remained in the area after closing the training camp, and he had clearly absorbed a great deal of local lore. He was highly intelligent and often surprisingly articulate, and I imagined that he had probably always had a genuine love of learning. Admittedly, I did question his choice of my father as a role model when there must have been more sensible options available, but that was ancient history. Daio and I had been barefoot while we were talking, to give our feet a break. Now we put our shoes back on, and as we strolled the length and breadth of that grassy meadow my companion shared his fascination with the Saya. There was a local legend (or perhaps it was more of a rumor) that if you dug deep enough it was still possible to unearth prehistoric stone axes made by our distant ancestors. Daio was intrigued by this possibility, and he had apparently spent a fair amount of time poking around in the soil in this general vicinity. On this day, after a brief impromptu dig with a twig he’d found, he proudly brought me a large chunk of dirt-encrusted rock that could conceivably have once been the head of a stone ax.

As we started to head downhill from the Saya we could see Akari and Ricchan finishing their calisthenics beside the river, where the willow trees bursting into fresh new foliage looked like a massive cloud of green smoke. Daio and I were midway down the steep slope when we noticed a couple of men striding toward Akari and Ricchan from the opposite direction.

By this time Akari was half sitting, half reclining on a portable air mattress (a position that showed how much his back pain had abated), with Ricchan next to him. As we watched from afar the two men squatted nearby and began speaking intently to Ricchan and Akari. Suddenly, Akari clapped his hands over his ears. I knew that gesture well; it was his way of expressing disapproval or revulsion when (for example) some giddy comedian on a TV talk show would launch into an off-color joke. Seeing this, I quickened my pace and scrambled down the slope as fast as I could go.

As I approached, the two men (who appeared to be in their forties) stopped talking and shifted their torsos so that they were facing my direction in a tense, watchful-looking stance that I interpreted as “ready to rumble.” When I arrived, panting, Ricchan stood up. Sliding her bare feet into a pair of canvas walking shoes, she explained what was going on.

“These men here were asking whether we knew the hidden meaning behind the Saya’s name,” she said, “but then without waiting for an answer they went ahead and told us the term they had in mind. Akari doesn’t like hearing that sort of thing, and that’s why he has his hands over his ears.”

As I explained earlier, the word saya, meaning a sheath for a sword, has long been the local nickname for the spot where a meteor landed in the midst of the forest and left a long, narrow indentation in the ground. However, saya also happens to be a crude colloquialism for the female sex organs — more precisely, the vagina. Daio was a few seconds behind me, and when the two men saw him charging in their direction they finally went on their way, laughing loudly and slapping each other on the back as if they had just shared some grand, uproarious adventure. From time to time they looked over their shoulders at us with faces that were red from an excess of sophomoric mirth.

“Well, those two ran away with their tails between their legs,” Daio said jocularly. “And no wonder, since Kogito was armed with a stone ax. Ha ha.”

“They were so persistent, I really didn’t know what to do,” Ricchan said.

At this, Akari finally removed his hands from his ears. “Don’t worry, Ricchan,” he said in a voice that was filled with emotion. And then he added, to my surprise, “If they come back, Papa will beat them up for us!”

I immediately recognized that phrasing as an echo of one of the more poignant quotes from My Own Words. It had been a very long time since I’d heard my son say anything so positive about me, and my heart swelled with a cautious infusion of hope.

Chapter 11. But Why The Golden Bough?

1

Since the first stirrings of my rapprochement with Akari (which, while still a work in progress, seemed to have taken a definite step in the right direction), our daily life had undergone a transformation. The sound system from Unaiko and Ricchan’s room was moved into the dining room, and Akari would often stretch out diagonally on the floor and listen to music or work on his compositions. Ricchan never took a single day off from their rehab sessions at the Saya, and even though she was busy with the usual plethora of activities, she never dropped the ball where Akari’s well-being was concerned.

I had set up my own base camp on the sofa that had been banished to the southwest corner of the great room to create more space for rehearsals, with my assorted work supplies — books, papers, and index cards — in (and on) a small filing cabinet next to the couch. As I soon realized, our current living arrangement was not so different from the one we’d had at home in Tokyo, except that in this house Akari and I would both retreat to the second floor when a rehearsal began. Ricchan spent a fair amount of time staying on top of bookkeeping and other office tasks on the computer she shared with Unaiko, but after Akari started listening to music in the dining room she would often sit at the dining-room table with her head bent over the production notes from the filming of Meisuke’s Mother Marches Off to War.

Daio continued to be a regular visitor, and in the spirit of sociability he and I would often join Ricchan at the table. Akari kept the volume on his music fairly low, and it never seemed to have an adverse effect on Ricchan’s concentration. By the same token Daio’s and my speaking voices, which had to be raised slightly to be heard over the music, didn’t seem to be an impediment to Akari’s listening pleasure. Noticing this, I was reminded of something Maki had once observed. When Akari was in listening-to-music mode, she said, his brain seemed to be in a separate realm than when he was speaking or hearing words.

As for my own brain, it was still completely devoid of ideas for a late-work book. I realized in retrospect that I had foolishly put all my creative eggs into the drowning-novel basket and hadn’t bothered to formulate a backup plan. Because I wasn’t working on anything in particular, I didn’t have to cleave to the kind of focused bibliographical list that normally accompanied my novel-writing process, so for once I was free to explore whatever caught my fancy on a given day. My current reading habits were shaped by a conscious continuo of self-restraint born of my fear that the Big Vertigo might pay me another unwelcome visit, so rather than poring over books in my study/bedroom it seemed to make more sense for me to wander downstairs, stretch out on the sofa, and browse through books at a leisurely pace.

It was while I was in this relaxed mode that some reading material I had requested from an editor friend in Tokyo—The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, by James George Frazer — was delivered. My friend had kindly sent all twelve volumes of the Elibron Classics facsimile, published in 2005, of Macmillan’s 1920–1923 edition. Part of the reason I had wanted to get my hands on a complete set was so I could ascertain where the three volumes from the red leather trunk fit into the whole. I was also making frequent reference to the Japanese translations of several volumes of The Golden Bough’s third edition. A certain publisher was in the process of issuing a translation of the entire set, and I had been receiving a complimentary copy of each volume as it came out (there was never any card, but I suspected that the gift had been arranged by a cultural anthropologist friend of mine), so I’d had those sent down here, too.

After my skirmishes with the Big Vertigo, instead of reading with maximum concentration for long stretches of time I fell into the habit of keeping a few books on the desk next to my bed and desultorily flipping through the pages whenever the mood struck me. But now that my conversations with Daio had led me to the Frazer books, my page-turning sessions had taken on a new intensity and focus. I was no longer merely browsing; I was on an active quest.

In keeping with this new resolve, I began to work my way through the three volumes of The Golden Bough I’d found in the red leather trunk, systematically parsing all the underlinings and marginal notes: the visible evidence of my father’s struggle, given his limited proficiency in English, to read these difficult books. (When I was paging through the books for the first time, back in Tokyo, I hadn’t paid any attention to these marks.) I didn’t find anything that would warrant being called marginalia, but there were a number of faint markings in hard-leaded colored pencil (primarily red and blue) — marks I suspected had been made in pencil rather than ink so they could eventually be erased.

Because the books had gotten wet in the river, many of the pages were stuck together and it was difficult to separate them without causing the old, brittle paper to tear or even disintegrate. Nonetheless, I could clearly see that some of the subtitles or subheadings had been lightly circled in colored pencil. At some point I realized the three books must have been a loan (if they had been a gift, the set would surely have been complete), but because my father had died unexpectedly they were never returned. It seemed safe to deduce that the barely legible notations had been made by the books’ original owner, perhaps as a way of letting my father know which segments that person considered especially significant.

If my assumption was correct (and I was confident it was), then the assiduous wielder of those colored pencils must have been the mentor whose name I had heard my father invoke in reverent tones on numerous occasions. Eureka, I thought. That’s it! These books had undoubtedly come from the so-called Kochi Sensei, who lived on the other side of Shikoku’s Sanmyaku mountain range: the same person my father had once gone to visit in search of knowledge, dragging Daio along with him. The pair had walked for many kilometers, following a route to the town of Kochi that followed the river and eventually fed into a road made famous in the mid-1860s by the Kochi-born samurai Ryoma Sakamoto. (As every Japanese schoolchild knows, Sakamoto traversed that roadway when he deserted his feudal clan to embark on a life of idealistic anti-shogunate political activism inspired by the democratic principles of the United States — a life cut short in 1867 when he was murdered by assassins at a lodging house in Kyoto.)

I began to probe in earnest, exploring the books in sequential order as I thought my father would have done. My goal was to replicate his experience as he attempted to read Frazer’s work in its original form, armed with nothing but a small, dog-eared copy of The Concise English-Japanese Dictionary (which I remembered having seen around the house), after his faithful disciple, Daio, had toted those heavy volumes home following their visit to the Kochi Sensei.

And what about the annotations? I was curious to see whether the Kochi Sensei had confined his explanations to the subheadings, or had commented on the text line by line. To my surprise, after a cursory flip through the pages (pausing only to peruse the headings and passages marked with red and blue pencil), it became clear why the Kochi Sensei had chosen these particular volumes as a means of furthering my father’s education. There was no doubt about it; the Kochi Sensei was using The Golden Bough’s anthropological and folkloric principles as a metaphor for politics!

I was on the third day of skimming the entire Golden Bough when Ricchan ventured into the great room to bring me a cup of coffee. She set the ceramic mug on the filing cabinet near the sofa and said, “I guess whenever you feel like working on this project, you have to make several trips to lug all the books down from the study. That must be good exercise!”

“These are the books I found in the red leather trunk during my previous visit,” I explained. “I’ve been trying to figure out why my father was reading them, and how, and I think I’m close to finding some answers.”

“I’m aware that The Golden Bough has been translated into Japanese, but I’ve never read it,” Ricchan said. “If you’re at a good stopping point, would you mind giving me a crash course? Hang on, I’ll just go grab my own coffee.”

I gathered the relevant materials and laid them out on the L-shaped sofa between the end where I was sitting and the perpendicular segment where Ricchan took a seat when she returned from the kitchen, mug in hand.

“The Golden Bough is a scholarly work about folklore,” I began, “but it also provides practical insight into interpersonal dynamics, particularly as they pertain to the realm of politics. My father was using these books as a means for furthering his own political education, but he seems to have had a penchant for the literary aspects as well, and I’ve been intrigued by the discovery that he apparently enjoyed the text on an artistic level, too. Ricchan, you’ve probably heard Daio referring to my father as ‘Choko Sensei,’ and I’m guessing it might have struck you as odd. ‘Sensei’ is a vestigial title, left over from the time when my father was running an ultranationalistic training camp and Daio was one of his disciples. But recently, as Daio and I have been talking, something rather surprising has emerged. He told me that my father sometimes liked to ramble about political matters, tossing around hard-line terms such as nation-state, Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and so on. However, according to Daio, below the blustery ultranationalistic surface my father’s true nature, even at the age of fifty, was still that of a literature-besotted youth.

“When I first started examining The Golden Bough, trying to see it through my father’s eyes, I noticed that in all three volumes someone had circled some of Frazer’s marginal notes, which are rather like summaries of the passages or subsections in question, in colored pencil. Look, here’s one right here. These confident markings appear to have been made by an experienced teacher, but what I didn’t notice at first was that there are also some more tentative notations, evidently added by a reader who hadn’t done much of this sort of thing before — underlining, question marks, exclamation points, and so on. As I continued reading, I realized that this second set of markings must have been made by my father. As Daio said, it’s obvious my father was captivated by the literary — or should I say poetic? — attributes of the book. But it’s equally clear that his mentor was trying to use The Golden Bough as a tool for teaching my father about politics. My father was obediently going along with the plan, but it appears to me as though he was trying to read it from a more artistic perspective as well. This has been a revelation for me; for the first time since I was born, I feel as if I’m seeing my father for who he really was. (At the time he was reading this book, of course, he was nearly twenty-five years younger than I am now.)

“The epigraph of the first volume is a quotation from a poem by Thomas Babington Macaulay. Here, take a look. I’ve laid out both the English and the Japanese translations, and as you can see the English style is quite archaic.”

From the still glassy lake that sleeps

Beneath Aricia’s trees—

Those trees in whose dim shadow

The ghastly priest doth reign,

The priest who slew the slayer,

And shall himself be slain….

“I think the translation is reasonably true to the original,” I continued after Ricchan had finished studying both versions of the poem. “I mean, this is one of those epic poems where everything is on the surface, so what you see is what you get. What’s interesting is that Frazer more or less echoes the same content — only in prose, of course — in various parts of his book. His style can be a bit flowery in places, but it’s mostly lucid and straightforward, and sometimes it’s absolutely gorgeous. I think my father managed to grasp that beauty, even through the laborious process of reading the text one word at a time with frequent recourse to The Concise (as we used to affectionately call the little English-Japanese dictionary). Seeing the evidence of his painstaking quest has almost made me feel pity, or at least sympathy, for my father: that fifty-year-old man who was on the cusp of a premature death by drowning.”

2

Next, I moved on to telling Ricchan about the sections that my father himself had circled, with particular emphasis on the concept of the “dying God.”

“The ‘King of the Wood,’ who’s mentioned in an early sentence, is so widely known that you could safely call him a major character in cultural history,” I explained. “In the Alban Hills of Italy, deep in the woods around Lake Nemi — which is basically a volcanic crater filled with water — there is a huge oak tree. A dark-visaged king, sword at his waist, is stationed nearby to protect the sacred tree. (Of course, you could also say that the king is protecting himself.) One after another, vigorous young men come to challenge the king to a sword fight. Once a challenger has vanquished the current monarch, that individual will become the new king. As the term ‘dying God’ suggests, in this mythology gods are not immortal; on the contrary, it is their destiny to die. When a king grows old and feeble, he and his realm will inevitably fall into ruin and be replaced. (Of course, the physical life force has long been associated with fertility cults and crop cycles in many cultures, including our own.)

“So how did the citizens cope with the impending crisis? Well, the people made a conscious effort to prevent the king from dying a natural death — that is, from illness or old age. While the old king still had some energy left, they would send a parade of candidates to attempt to kill him, until someone finally succeeded. And with the ascension of a new king the world, too, would experience a rebirth of sorts: a renewal of fertility. That’s the basic premise. Anyone can see that the myth of the Forest King of Nemi is one of the underlying themes of the entire Golden Bough, from beginning to end. The archetypal myth about the new king who kills his aged predecessor, thus engendering a renascence of fertility in the world, was already firmly established in the folkloric canon when Frazer arrived at the party, so to speak. However, Frazer expanded on the theme at great length, and I think the person who loaned my father these books made the marks to indicate that my father ought to jump ahead and read the pages about the way the old king was killed, and the earth regained its power and vitality as a result. It’s clear from the marginal annotations that my father was under the influence of a mentor who was exceedingly intense about the teaching of political science.”

While I was speaking to Ricchan, Daio ambled into the great room and I saw Akari (who was lying on the floor nearby) raise one hand in greeting. Daio had been out in the south-side garden, doing his usual landscaping chores, and he had apparently been listening to our conversation through a partially open sliding glass door.

“Holy cow, Kogito,” he said. “I think the last time I heard you talking so passionately about anything was while you were still in high school, the weekend you brought Goro to the training camp. Please continue your discussion — don’t mind me!”

“All right,” I replied. “I’m going to get back to Frazer’s book, but I’ll keep in mind that you’re listening too now, Daio. Anyway, I think I’ve figured out the overarching point that the Kochi Sensei was trying to make with all his little notes in the margins. As I told Ricchan, I’ve also realized that while my father was dutifully reading The Golden Bough in order to glean the lessons in political theory his own mentor was trying to impart, he was also reading it on another, more personal level and appreciating the beauty of the prose as a work of literary art. That’s something you’ve mentioned as well, Daio. However, his guru’s notes were clearly focused on posing the question: What should the old king’s followers be doing, in a political sense?

“If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to read this excerpt from the Frazer book aloud: But no amount of care and precaution will prevent the man-god from growing old and feeble and at last dying. His worshippers have to lay their account with this sad necessity and to meet it as best they can. The danger is a formidable one; for if the course of nature is dependent on the man-god’s life, what catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay. The advantages of thus putting the man-god to death instead of allowing him to die of old age and disease are, to the savage, obvious enough.”

After I had finished reading, Akari walked silently past us on his way to the restroom. (He had been lying on the floor for a long time, and getting to his feet obviously caused some lower-back pain.) A moment later we heard a loud noise as the door banged shut behind him.

“Akari really hates it when they interrupt his music programs with a breaking-news bulletin, especially when it has to do with murder or any other kind of violent crime,” Ricchan said. “I don’t think our discussion about the state-sanctioned killing of kings sat well with him. That’s why he slammed the door.”

I turned to Daio. “By the way,” I said, “I’ve finally come to understand why my mother and sister were so terrified I might someday finish the drowning novel. I think they were afraid I would tell the world that the Kochi Sensei was using The Golden Bough to convince my father and his cohorts to kill the living god: that is, Emperor Hirohito.”

When Daio didn’t respond, I went on, “The thing is, Daio, the events of that night — the feverish atmosphere of the meeting at the storehouse, and the way the officers seemed to suddenly be ostracizing my father — struck me as completely mystifying at the time. I still find them baffling, even now. What I’d like to know, and I’m hoping you’ll be able to tell me, is whether my father and the young officers really understood each other. I mean, suddenly their ties are severed, and my father rushes out alone and drowns. Surely those occurrences must have had some effect on you, as a young man who looked up to my father?”

The sunlight from the back garden seemed to have turned Daio’s close-cropped white hair into a kind of golden aureole. He stood there for a moment with his head held high, thinking, while I waited for an answer. Evidently something about this tableau rubbed Ricchan the wrong way because she snapped, “Hey, how long do you guys expect Akari to stay barricaded in the restroom in self-defense? I mean, he was down here trying to relax, and then he was forced to put up with your talk about death and murder and drowning, just a few feet away! It’s almost time for one of his favorite FM radio programs, Classics Special, so maybe you two could give him a little space. Please?”

Then she added in a softer tone, “This afternoon we’ll be going to the Saya again, and you’re both welcome to tag along. If you could just do us the favor of not hanging around too close to where Akari’s listening to his music, you can continue your gruesome discussion at the top of your lungs, if that’s what you want to do!”

3

After leaving the van in a large open space (a designated turnaround for forestry trucks), we set out on foot along the pathway, thickly bordered by trees and bushes, that crossed over the mountain stream. Daio led the way, with a thin exercise mat and a blanket draped over his one arm, and the rest of us followed in single file. Ricchan was the very model of a perfect caregiver. Carrying a large Boston bag, she stepped carefully in her canvas walking shoes while her body language seemed to be saying, If Akari should lose his balance and start to fall, I’m ready to jump into the shrubbery and hold him up.

The path dead-ended at the lower part of the Saya. We stopped there and Daio spread out the exercise mat on a flat, narrow strip of grassland next to the stream. Ricchan, meanwhile, was extracting the components of the portable sound system and an assortment of CDs from the ubiquitous Boston bag. After Akari had taken a seat on the mat and started to remove his shoes, Daio and I took our leave and headed toward the upper reaches of the Saya.

“I remember the war was still going on when I was given the second floor of the paperbush warehouse down by the river as a place to stay,” Daio said as we climbed the hill, side by side. “I settled in nicely, but I didn’t set foot in the ‘Saya zone’—that is, this area right here — until quite a bit later.”

“The Saya has had an important place in local history for centuries,” I replied, “but it was never one of the spots local people would share with a visitor from the outside world.”

“I remember one time I was invited to go fishing with the man I’ve mentioned, whose son-in-law became a doctor,” Daio said. “It was sweetfish season, as I recall. Anyhow, he told me the triangular delta where your father’s body washed ashore is considered a ‘special spot,’ and he said that even after all these years children still won’t go in the water there. When you think about the ancient landmarks in an area like this, each with its own story, it kind of makes sense that a relatively new site could have taken on ‘special’ overtones as well.

“Kogito, I know you’ve been having a recurrent dream about what you saw the night of the big flood, when your father took off in his little boat. Asa said you kept insisting that you felt as though you had really seen your father sinking to the bottom of the deep river, and I can’t help thinking the image might have been something you dreamed. Why? Because I was the one who spotted Choko Sensei’s dead body lying on the riverbed in shallow water, and you were nowhere in sight. Asa said you were always saying that Kogii (who was already in the boat) and you were the only ones who saw what happened that night, but she knew for a fact that your mother was standing on top of the promontory, watching the whole scene unfold. And I know there was at least one other witness, because that witness was me.

“After I saw Choko Sensei take off in his little boat, I ran back to tell the army officers. After a great deal of discussion, some of us decided to go out looking for your father as soon as it began to get light. I remember the sky was just beginning to show some faint signs of dawn when we jumped on bicycles and set off down the road along the river. At the top of the sandbar down by Honmachi, we ran into someone who had happened to see a boat flipping over by the light of the moon, so we figured we should start by searching the area along the sandbar. We split up, and as I’ve mentioned before, I was the one who found Choko Sensei’s body lying in some shallow water.

“That’s how it happened, but afterward your mother tried to make sure you never got a chance to talk to anyone who had been involved in pulling your father’s body out of the water; I guess she wanted to protect you from hearing the awful details. You left home when you were fifteen, and from then on you didn’t really hang out much with anyone from here, did you? And even during the five years between your father’s death and your departure for Tokyo, you were kind of a loner. I’ve run into some people who knew you in those days, and they said that whenever they saw you at the new middle school you always seemed to be sitting alone in an empty classroom between classes and at lunchtime, reading a book. Asa was really your only link to this area, and thanks to your mother, you and your sister were estranged for many years. I’m not sure, but I think you may be the only person raised around here who ever uprooted himself so completely — roots, trunk, branches, leaves, and all, as the saying goes.

“But even after everything that’s happened since you moved away, I think at heart you’re still a boy from the forest. I mean, the things you write draw heavily on the stories your mother and grandmother told you growing up, and no matter how much you embellish them with imagination, for me, your books always seem to smell like the truth. That reminds me of something I used to say to your mother during her later years — of course, by then you had long since become a Tokyoite and rarely visited, even though she had finally relented and granted you the freedom to visit whenever you pleased (just as long as you didn’t show up too often).

“Anyhow, I remember one time I said to her, ‘Kogito’s novels are pure fantasy, aren’t they? It’s amazing to me that he can exercise his imagination to such a degree and make things up out of whole cloth. When you come right down to it, I guess it’s a simple matter of talent.’

“And then — maybe it was because she thought I was using some highfalutin-sounding words or something — your mother cut me down to size, snapping, ‘That isn’t fantasy; it’s just imagination.’ Then she went on to say, ‘My husband used to read the books of Kunio Yanagida, and he told me that according to Yanagida there is a clear difference between fantasy and imagination, because imagination has some basis in reality. So what Kogii’s doing is writing mostly about real things, which he augments by using his imagination. He has a very good memory for the tales his grandmother and I used to tell him, and because he used folklore as a sort of launching pad for his imaginings, when we read his early books there wasn’t a single thing to make us think, Gee, this right here is some really far-fetched fantasy.’

“That’s what your mother said to me. Her comments made me angry, and I countered by saying, ‘Yeah, but what about the really crazy book, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, where Choko Sensei is portrayed as a grotesque caricature who has bladder cancer, and he gets loaded into a makeshift wooden chariot and goes off to rob a bank?’ And your mother came back with, ‘Oh, that wasn’t imagination, or fantasy. That was outright delusion!’ Ha ha ha!”

While Daio was delivering this animated monologue, we had been making steady progress up the grassy hill and were now standing at the heart of the Saya: the scabbard-shaped indentation in the meadow.

“Sorry,” Daio continued after he had finished laughing, “I got kind of carried away reminiscing about the fun I used to have talking with your mother. Now that we’ve come to a place where we don’t have to worry about being overheard, we should probably get back to the serious matters we were discussing earlier, don’t you think? Because I keep coming up against a vexing problem, and every time I try to work it out on my own, I seem to end up getting sidetracked or else giving up entirely. If I could only get this matter resolved, there might turn out to be some connection with the recurrent dream that’s been plaguing you for all these years.

“As I mentioned, Asa told me about the dream and I know you’ve even put it down on paper. From my perspective, I don’t believe it should be dismissed as ‘just a dream.’ Now, I’m no expert — this is something I happened to read in a book about dream interpretation, aimed at amateurs like me — but apparently when a child tries to tell its mother something and she refuses to listen, the things the child wanted to express can be turned inward and incorporated into dreams, which eventually merge seamlessly with memories. And then, according to the book, the child can grow up to be someone like you who’s haunted by recurrent dreams. I would never presume to psychoanalyze you, but based on what I’ve heard I can’t help feeling that your genuine memories (even if you don’t actively remember them when you’re awake) have somehow been filtered through those dreams.

“You told this story in one of your newspaper columns, but apparently a cultural anthropologist friend of yours was doing fieldwork somewhere in Indonesia — I believe it was on Flores Island — when he made an interesting discovery in a remote settlement up in the mountains. The people of the tribe had created a giant replica of an airplane from twigs and bits of wood and enshrined it in a clearing in the forest. In your essay you said that when you first heard about this, your heart skipped a beat, and when I read that line I thought, I’ll bet Kogito was remembering a dream he had when he was a child.”

“It’s certainly true I was captivated by a drawing of the primitive replica of a plane I saw in some field notes made by that anthropologist friend of mine — he was an accomplished artist as well, and his sketches would have put a professional to shame — and you’re right in thinking it reminded me uncannily of one of my childhood dreams,” I said. “And now I’m feeling shaken up all over again, because this place you’ve brought me to, the Saya, is the spot where the dream in question took place. In my dream it was above here to the north, beyond the big meteoric boulder, that I came across the tail of a wrecked aircraft. The plane’s body was nearby, facing downward. It wasn’t made of wood, though; it appeared to have been cobbled together from spare machine parts. But really, Daio, your powers of deductive reasoning are quite extraordinary!”

“Really? I don’t know — maybe your mother’s analytical approach to things somehow rubbed off on me! No, but seriously, like she said, imagination (as opposed to pure fantasy) usually has some basis in fact.

“In this case, during the days before your father’s death there was a series of meetings combined with a nonstop drinking party, and even though you were just a child you must have overheard quite a bit of the discussion. I’m not sure about this, but my guess is that you would have been feeling dismayed and confused by what you heard. On the day before your father took off alone, I remember seeing you lurking in the corridor behind the big tatami-matted room upstairs during one of those meetings with a worried look on your face. And I thought, All this conspiratorial talk must sound pretty scary to a kid, but it wasn’t my place to shoo you away. And then after your father died you must have locked those memories away somewhere deep in your unconscious and then convinced yourself that the things you overheard were just part of a dream. I think the time has come for me to blow the lid off some of those secrets, so I’m going to tell you what actually happened.

“The plan was to sneak onto the military airfield at Yoshidahama and steal a fully loaded kamikaze plane, then fly east from there. The pilots were supposed to land the stolen plane in the Saya, right here in the middle of the forest, and somehow hide it until it was needed. That risky maneuver was the main point of contention during those meetings you were eavesdropping on.”

“Yes, I wrote about it in The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, only I framed it as the fantastical imaginings of a young man who was in the process of losing his mind,” I said.

“Hey, I read that little book!” Daio exclaimed. “It was right after your mother summoned me and basically held my feet to the fire, demanding to know whether I’d ever told you about the meeting or whether you, as a ten-year-old child, had been listening through the walls. Again, I’m no psychiatrist, but it seems as if a disturbing memory that had been buried or suppressed for many years found its way to the surface through your dreams — probably helped along by the fact that a novelist’s mind moves in strange and mysterious ways. Anyhow, when your mother showed me the passage in The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, I told her in no uncertain terms: ‘I see what you’re getting at, but I don’t see any cause for concern. Your deepest fear seems to be that Kogito understood what was going on in his father’s meetings with the military officers, and that at some point he might write a much bigger novel than this one and you would all end up in complete disgrace, like the family of Kotoku Sensei after the High Treason Incident, but I’m sure it will never happen. Even for me, and I was quite a bit older, the things I heard at some of those meetings seemed like total gibberish. They made no sense to me, and I’m sure they would have been even more incomprehensible to a child.’

“As it turned out, I was right. You never did write the big exposé your mother was so afraid of. And since you’ve completely given up on the drowning novel, your practical-minded sister, Asa, can finally breathe a sigh of relief, and I think that’s a very good thing.

“However, the truth is that I’m still left with a few nagging doubts. We aren’t talking about your conscious mind now but rather the unconscious, right? Either way, I doubt if you really understood the words you were hearing when you eavesdropped on those meetings, but somehow your dreaming mind was able to figure everything out, and the significance of what you’d overheard became clear in your dreams. Doesn’t that seem like a plausible explanation? On some level you knew there was a plan to steal a military plane and hide it at the Saya for future use, to bomb the Imperial Palace. And as you realized in your dream, the radical plan was the reason your father behaved so erratically during his last hours on earth. But the plan never came to fruition, and your unconscious mind invented the next scene.”

“Even so, the image of a warplane hidden on the grassy area of the Saya had no basis in reality,” I said. “I don’t know whether you’d call it fantasy, or the surreal inventiveness of the dreaming mind …”

“What do you mean, ‘fantasy’? The image was definitely grounded in fact, or at least in possibility. As I already told you, the issue of ‘borrowing’ the aircraft was a major sticking point in the endless discussions between your father and the military guys who were at your house. At that final meeting, they were talking about how Japan’s defeat in the war appeared to be much more imminent than they had been led to believe, and the discussion got very heated because your father kept insisting they ought to rush ahead with his favorite scheme, which involved a suicide attack on the Imperial Palace from the air. As I’ve mentioned, there were some new faces at the meeting: several young trainee pilots who were attending the Imperial Navy course in the village. They had been brought along by the usual army-officer participants, and they all went up to the Saya to dig out turpentine from the roots of the pine trees — needless to say, turpentine oil has dozens of uses, and like almost everything else it was in short supply during the war. Anyhow, I guess seeing the layout of the Saya gave the young pilots some ideas of their own, because after they returned to the house they were saying the best approach would be to ‘liberate’ a kamikaze plane at the airfield, make sure it was loaded with bombs, and then hide it somewhere around the Saya. You must remember that, at least; it was a major point of discussion.”

“Well, it’s not as if everything that went on at those drinking parties and meetings was clearly delineated in my dream, much less in my memory,” I said, shaking my head. “Even today, I’m still puzzled by many of the things I overheard. For example, the lines from The Golden Bough I read aloud a while ago were definitely circled in colored pencil by the Kochi Sensei, but I can’t help wondering why he placed so much emphasis on ‘killing the living God’ as a way of bringing rebirth and prosperity to a country. Did he really think those precepts could be applied directly to postwar realpolitik? I honestly don’t know. I mean, incendiary marginalia aside, there’s no actual proof my father (or his teacher) was reading The Golden Bough pragmatically, with the idea that its ancient mythologies could be translated into action to help steer this country’s imperial system through the postwar morass of chaos and disintegration. I know the others saw you as a kind of loyal retainer whose main job was to warm the sake and keep everyone’s cups filled, but it’s clear you were paying close attention to everything that went on in those meetings. So what I’d like to ask you now, Daio, is whether the group had a definite plan, in the form of a military strategy, to rescue this country from its postwar predicament, and if so, whether my father was the primary author of the plan.”

“Yes, most definitely,” Daio replied without hesitation. “At that point the strategy sessions had become deadly serious, and given the extent of your eavesdropping I’m surprised you even need to ask about your father’s role. He was the one who came up with the idea of bombing the Imperial Palace, but the others took the idea and ran with it, and some of the young military guys started talking about blowing up the big meteoric rock at the Saya to create a landing strip for the plane they were planning to steal. When he heard that, Choko Sensei got very upset and started shouting things like ‘What’s this nonsense about bombing the big rock? Do you really think I’m going to let a bunch of outsiders come in and deface the Saya? That spot isn’t some flash-in-the-pan landmark from the Meiji Era or something. It’s been an important local site since olden times, and you can’t just waltz in and start blowing things up to build a temporary airstrip!’ You must have heard that tirade, right?”

“Yes, I did,” I said. “To be honest, when I heard my father shouting I literally began to tremble. A moment later one of the officers came out into the hall where I was standing, still shaking like a leaf, and he said, ‘Listen, kiddo, we’re going to be talking about some important things from now on, so you’d better run along to the main house.’ So I did.

“It was much later when my father returned, and while I was aware that he and my mother were talking in low voices, I was in my bedroom so I couldn’t make out what they were saying. In retrospect I realize they were probably discussing my father’s decision to run away in his little boat. As a mere child, I couldn’t very well ask what was going on, but it was obvious the next day that my mother was helping my father get ready for a trip. At one point my father asked me to extract the tube from an old bicycle tire and blow it full of air, but that was nothing unusual. All day, from morning to evening, my chest seemed to be constricted with a vague feeling of anxiety, but I didn’t know why. During that time the military guys were still quietly holed up in the outbuilding next door. The scene I remember so vividly — my father’s departure on the stormy river — happened very late at night, long after my usual bedtime. I’m not sure what time it was, but …”

“So you didn’t really understand what you overheard outside the meeting room!” Daio interjected. “I always used to wonder how much you knew. I even suspected you might be feigning ignorance, but now I realize that wasn’t the case. Rather, I think your memories have been quarantined or frozen somewhere deep in your unconscious because the things you heard (the army officers clashing with your father about the Saya and so on) were just too confusing for your childish mind to deal with.

“Sorry, I don’t mean to monopolize the conversation, but I want to explain my theory. First, under the guidance of his teacher in Kochi, your father read The Golden Bough, with special emphasis on the part about the tradition of killing the old king to protect the country from succumbing to decay and debilitation, and that gave him the idea of bombing the Imperial Palace. He was able to get the army officers on board with this rather extreme plan, at least at first, and they started to get excited about it (to say the least) during the two-day drinking party masquerading as a policy meeting. But I really don’t think that discussion would have made sense to you, not only because you were an innocent child, but also because your formal education was based on the nationalistic, emperor-worshipping model. Actually, the thing that made the lightbulb go on in my head was seeing Unaiko’s ‘dog-tossing’ dramatization of Kokoro. That really got me thinking. The Sensei character in Kokoro talks about the ‘spirit of the age’ or ‘the spirit of the Meiji Era,’ right? In any case, during the performance someone from the audience asked whether a person like Sensei, who had turned his back both on his own era and on society in general, could really be said to have been influenced by the spirit of his age to the point where he ended up taking his own life when the era came to an end. As you know, that sparked a major ruckus, with stuffed dogs flying through the air in all directions.

“Anyhow, that somehow made me think about you, Kogito. Your early education had a militaristic slant, so the ‘spirit of the age’ you grew up in demanded total allegiance to an emperor who was believed to be a god incarnate. (I don’t believe a valid comparison can be drawn between those sentiments and the so-called spirit of Meiji Soseki wrote about, but that’s another discussion for another day.)

“Fifteen years or so ago, you turned down the emperor’s highest cultural award because of your unwavering belief in the principles of postwar democracy, and as a result my young disciples at the training camp (who were still totally committed to emperor worship) decided you were their archenemy. I think that was probably the motivation behind the practical joke they played, sending you a giant live turtle and telling you I was dead, but they could have just done it for mischief, pure and simple. As for me, I think if you’re going to talk about Kogito Choko in terms of the spirit of an age, there are two distinct facets. The first half of the Showa Era you grew up in — in other words, until 1945—revolved around a godlike emperor, while the second half, after the war, was shaped by democratic principles. I think your personal trajectory reflects that as well.

“So we have a ten-year-old boy who was born in the first half of the era and who is, in effect, a poster child for that period in history. This boy happens to overhear his father — whom he holds in great esteem — talking about a scheme in which some navy men, trained in piloting military aircraft, would stage a suicide attack to kill the living god — that is, the emperor. Does it really seem likely that a boy whose schooling was rooted in emperor-worshipping nationalism would be able to process such a radical idea? No, I think what young Kogito heard was so shocking that his conscious mind simply suppressed it. And the only thing the eavesdropping kid retained, indelibly lodged in his unconscious, was the image of the young pilots at the Saya practicing their takeoffs and landings — a fantasy scene he had only heard described through a wall. And there you have it: the source of your Saya dream. Of course, the additional details and embellishments were provided by your famously fertile imagination, which would later bear fruit in the form of novels, but mark my words: your imaginings were firmly based on things that were discussed in the meeting you were surreptitiously listening in on!”

Daio paused for a moment in triumph and then went on: “And so I’ve come to the conclusion that for you, as the unofficial representative of the spirit of the prewar half of the Showa Era, it was simply impossible to wrap your head around what you heard your father saying. On the one hand, your father was an outsider who had married into the village and had embraced many of the local traditions, and I think those stories had a deeper hold on his psyche than the ultranationalist dogma he was spouting to the young officers. The land around the Saya was considered by local folks to be the heart of the forest, so there was no way your father was going to let a bunch of young whippersnappers come charging in and tramp all over the ancient site, digging up the roots of the pine trees with pickaxes and trowels to get at the valuable turpentine, then adding insult to injury by proposing to raze that hallowed ground for use as an airstrip. That was the father you knew and looked up to. But on the other hand, from what you’d overheard it also sounded as if your father was the instigator of a crazy plan to kill the living god!

“I honestly believe your father was probably opposed to such radical tactics, in his heart, but maybe he had just reached a point where he felt the need for a grand symbolic act. So when it became clear that Japan was going to lose the war, he and his cohorts probably discussed a scenario wherein, if the emperor abdicated his throne, they would commit premeditated ritual suicide — you know, junshi. The truth is, Kogito, by the time your father reached the stage of talking about dispatching a kamikaze bomber to target the center of Tokyo, where the palace is, I think he had already resolved to end his own life, one way or another. I didn’t have the courage to tell you this before, but I never thought Choko Sensei was the type of man who would live a long, uneventful life and die a peaceful death in his own bed. To be honest, I don’t believe his drowning was an accident at all.”

4

There we stood, Daio and I, leaning against the big meteoric rock. The sun was sinking in the west, and the new growth on the trees around the Saya was shrouded in a rosy-hued haze. As I gazed at the forest I was picturing a faraway scene in Frazer’s ancient Forest of Nemi, where there wouldn’t yet have been any sign of the multifarious foliage we associate with modern-day Italy — no bay laurels, no olives, no oleanders, no citrus trees — and only the beeches and oaks would be growing in abundance. I thought with pleasure of the charmingly archaic language Frazer used to describe those trees: the beechwoods and oakwoods, with their deciduous foliage. …

Daio, meanwhile, was pointing toward the bottom of the hill. “Hey, look, Ricchan’s waving at us,” he observed. “Akari’s standing up as well, putting his cast back on by himself. I’m glad we were able to have this long chat, Kogito; I’ve been wanting to tell you some of these things for the longest time. When I heard from your mother that you were going away to college in Tokyo, I thought, Well then, I’d better study really hard and make sure I become the kind of person who can carry on an intelligent conversation with Kogito when he comes back, so I started taking correspondence courses right away, after you left. The tuition wasn’t terribly expensive, but the students were also required to go up to Tokyo once a year for some classroom time, and your mother helped me with the fees. Of course, after the war ended I wanted to keep the training camp going as a tribute to your father’s memory — after all, I was his number one disciple. As a result I was never able to live a normal life, and your mother was kind enough to sympathize with my situation.”

Daio and I quickly traversed the grassy downhill slope below the Saya, which was now completely in the shade. When we reached the sandy shore of the river, Daio used his one sturdy arm to grab a large bag that Ricchan had just finished packing and hoisted it onto his shoulder. Akari, who had clearly benefited from his rehab exercises, picked up the Boston bag and started to walk toward the van, with Ricchan by his side to lend support if needed. I brought up the rear of our little procession, trudging along in silence and carrying nothing except the immeasurable weight of the things Daio had just told me.

Daio had no reason to share in my wordless reverie, and after a few moments he spoke. “Kogito, it occurred to me that more than half a century has passed since Choko Sensei died prematurely, at the age of fifty. Most of the people who knew your father are gone as well, including your mother — who was larger than life in her own right — but she died without ever having said anything regarding her husband, as far as I know. I mean, seriously, not a single word! Asa told me how disappointed you were when you finally got to open the red leather trunk, which should theoretically have contained the papers and correspondence your father left behind, and didn’t find anything you could use. But on the bright side, as an indirect result of your discovery of the three volumes of The Golden Bough, I got to talk to you about some serious matters that have been weighing on my mind for years.

“I know I usually start blathering every time I meet up with you, while you seem to mostly listen in silence, and I’m always left with the feeling that I don’t really know what’s going on in your head. Actually, that’s been the case ever since you were a high school sophomore, when you brought Goro Hanawa to visit us at the training camp. Even after the intense conversation you and I just had, I still have no idea what you’re thinking, or feeling. Even so, it looks to me as though we’re both remembering the events of the night your father drowned, over and over again … and of course you keep reliving it in your dreams as well.

“Oh, that reminds me. I know your mother told Asa that she thought your father had become frightened by what he’d gotten himself into, and that was why he tried to run away. (I gather you’ve listened to the recording she made?) Obviously, that isn’t how I see it, and I was there. I guess you’ve been processing everything in your own silent, inscrutable way, but I have finally come to the conclusion that no matter how much we speculate about your father’s motivations, no one will ever know for sure why he behaved as he did on that night. Maybe it’s one of those riddles that can never be solved.

“Well, here I am rambling on again, but I remembered just now that the officers were saying some rather rude things behind Choko Sensei’s back during those highly charged days before he died. And a word that cropped up more than once during those surreptitious conversations was mononoke (you know, in the sense of a supernatural spirit that possesses a living person). I wasn’t familiar with the word at the time, but when I encountered it later I remember thinking, Ah, so that’s what those officers were whispering about.

“Actually, on reflection, I used to hear that word in the officers’ private conversations even during the earlier time when they were getting along relatively well with your father. In the beginning, your father rarely participated in the officers’ discussions. But then he suddenly got very gung ho and vocal about everything, and he even went so far as to make the trek to the Kochi Sensei’s house to talk things over with him.

“I remember what one of the officers said: ‘As someone who was born and raised deep in this forest’—your father had deliberately given them that impression—’Old Man Choko gets all fired up about things to a degree that seems alarming to guys like us who were raised in cities and towns. It’s almost as if he’s been possessed by a spirit or a demon or a fox or something.’ The officer added that a person like your father could get totally carried away by his ideas and turn into a loose cannon. During that meeting your father and the officers had a difference of opinion about their plan, and they reached an impasse. By the next morning everybody knew he was planning to run away in his little rowboat, but while he was making the preparations for his departure none of the military guys made any effort to stop him. It wasn’t much past noon when they got into party mode and started drinking themselves silly, and they ordered me to fetch the red leather trunk. As I mentioned before, they somehow knew your father was planning to take it with him when he fled, and they obviously wanted to censor the contents and remove anything that might have incriminated them. Then around midnight you came over to the storehouse to retrieve the trunk.

“After your father left, I got a very clear sense that the military guys were all thinking that if your father rushed off in a panic and ended up drowning in the flooded river, it would be good riddance from their point of view, as long as he didn’t leave any evidence behind to implicate them. That’s why they didn’t try to stop him from going. They even made a point of warning me, as a very junior member of the group, not to do anything to dissuade Choko Sensei from his rash plan, so I just had to watch him go. After I assured them he really had taken off in his rowboat, it seemed to set their minds at ease. They even went with me to look for Sensei’s remains once it got light, since no one really expected him to survive his trip down the flooded river in the flimsy little boat.

“I’ll never forget what one of the officers said to one of his young cohorts right about then. He was talking about your father’s plan to steal a kamikaze bomber from the Yoshidahama airfield (an idea everyone had pretended to be enthusiastic about when it first came up) and he said, ‘Of course, to us, the plan seemed like a big joke all along!’ And then they both gave kind of a weak, mean-spirited laugh — I guess you’d call it a snigger. I still can’t forgive those two officers, although I suppose both of them are probably long since dead and gone.

“Only … I don’t mean to go on and on about this, but I can’t get it out of my mind. I really think the two of us — you still having the same dream after all these years, and me still obsessed with trying to figure out the truth about that night — are the only people left in the world who can even spare a thought for Choko Sensei anymore!”

At this point, I remembered a question I had been wanting to ask. “Daio, you seem to have very lucid memories about the night of the big flood and the following morning, but what about the red leather trunk I took to my father when he was already on board the boat? Do you know how much time elapsed before that trunk was finally returned to my mother?”

“Oh, the trunk,” Daio said. “Yeah, apparently it floated downstream and finally washed ashore a few kilometers past the spot where the boat capsized. It was retrieved by some fishermen and taken to the police station, and eventually (it could have been weeks, or months) the cops went to your house and returned it to your mother. As for the letters and papers that were inside, those had already been sifted through and censored by the officers. Whether the war had ended in victory or defeat for Japan, there was nothing left in the trunk to raise a warning flag for anyone on any side. No incriminating evidence at all — the officers made sure of that. Of course during that time of crisis, with the Occupation and whatnot, those local policemen certainly didn’t have time to be poring over an English-language edition of The Golden Bough looking for evidence of subversive activities! Until recently the only people who had seen inside the trunk in recent memory were your mother and your sister, as far as I know. And even though the trunk had been more or less sanitized by the officers, I guess those two strong women decided to keep the remaining contents out of your hands to avoid any possible negative repercussions from the drowning novel you wanted to write. In retrospect, maybe they were being overly cautious, but I guess they felt it was important to try to protect the family name from any hint of scandal.”

Daio paused for a moment, then continued. “Choko Sensei was — and still is — the most important teacher I’ve ever had, but to be honest, I hold your mother in even higher esteem. In my personal ranking system, she’s at the very top, above your father. From the time you were a child, I always believed you were no ordinary person. But since we’re ranking things, I’m sure you know your mother always thought Asa was a more balanced human being than you are, in a practical sense, and I think she died happy, knowing that Asa would outlive us all.

“I remember your mother used to say that in the House of Choko, the women never fail to outshine the men. Apparently it’s been true going back to your grandmother’s time. Or if you wanted to go even further, maybe you could include Meisuke’s mother. Your mother always said she might have been a distant relative of yours!”